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What Is Mandated Reporting?

Dr. Amy Marschall is an autistic clinical psychologist with ADHD, working with children and adolescents who also identify with these neurotypes among others. She is certified in TF-CBT and telemental health.

Steven Gans, MD is board-certified in psychiatry and is an active supervisor, teacher, and mentor at Massachusetts General Hospital.

kali9/E+/Getty

Who Is a Mandated Reporter?

• Requirements
• Failure to Report
• What Information Is Disclosed?

What Other Things Might Be Reported?

Mandated reporting refers to the legal obligation to report abuse. Mandated reporters are individuals or agencies that are legally required to make these reports. In the United States, mandated reporting laws vary significantly.

The Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN) allows you to look up mandated reporting laws for your state.

At a Glance

Mandating reporting laws vary by state. In some cases, certain professionals and organizations are required to report suspected abuse, while some states and jurisdictions require all residents, even private citizens, to report suspected abuse. However, anyone can report abuse, neglect, or abandonment whether or not they are a mandated reporter.

Research suggests that mandatory reporting requires professionals to make accurate and informed decisions in children's best interest. Since laws vary by state, there are some jurisdictional differences about who is required to make these reports. Typically, this includes the following individuals:

• Babysitters
• Daycare providers
• Law enforcement
• Teacher's aids
• Other school employees
• Other medical professionals
• Psychologists
• Social workers
• Other therapists

In addition, certain organizations and agencies are required to report suspected abuse, which can include:

• Child advocacy organizations
• Domestic abuse organizations
• Medical clinics

You do not have to be a mandated reporter to report suspected abuse. Anyone can report suspected abuse, and in some states, non-mandated reporters can make these reports anonymously.

Mandated Reporting Requirements

Although states vary on the specifics, mandated reporters exist to ensure safety by reporting suspected abuse. The local department of human services (sometimes called Child Protective Services or Department of Social Services) investigates the report and determines whether intervention is necessary.

Mandated reporters may report suspected child abuse , elder abuse, or vulnerable adult abuse.

Abuse can include physical, sexual , or emotional abuse (though many states do not include emotional abuse under mandated reporting laws), neglect, and exposure to unsafe environments, such as drug use or domestic violence .

Mandated reporters typically do not investigate suspected abuse; rather, their obligation is to report their suspicions. For example, if a child discloses that a parent hit them, the mandated reporter does not reach out to the parent to confirm the report but instead reports the allegation.

Mandated reporters are only required to disclose allegations to the department of human services. They are not required to tell the parent or guardian about the report, and often a mandated reporter will not share the allegation if the guardian might be the perpetrator. The information is kept private for safety reasons and to prevent further abuse in retaliation for making the report.

What Happens If a Mandated Reporter Doesn't Report?

Mandated reporters are legally required to follow state laws about reporting abuse and neglect. Failing to make a report is a crime and is classed as a misdemeanor in most states, with specific penalties varying by jurisdiction.

They must report even if they are uncertain about whether or not the allegation is true. Mandated reporters might also be subject to civil litigation for failing to protect a vulnerable individual.

In some states, there is no statute of limitations on failing to make a report. As such, victims of abuse can pursue charges against the mandated reporter no matter how long ago they disclosed the abuse.

Because mandated reporters are required to make these reports, they cannot be penalized for making a report in good faith. In addition, if someone who is not a mandated reporter makes a report that turns out to be unfounded, they cannot be penalized. This is because safety is important, and people must not be penalized for trying to keep vulnerable populations safe.

What Information Is Disclosed in the Report?

Again, requirements vary by state; however, reports must include information about the victim, perpetrator, current location, and the allegation. Sometimes, limited information is available, and the report will only include the information that is available.

The mandated reporter can request a confirmation letter documenting that they made the report. The letter might include information about the outcome of the investigation.

Guardians can request information about the report; however, this might not include who made the report. Because a perpetrator might punish the victim for reporting abuse, information about who made the report is typically kept confidential.

How to Report Abuse

Check with your state Department of Health and Welfare or contact local law enforcement to learn where to report suspected abuse. The information included during mandated reporting will include:

• Names of the child, family, and their contact information
• Where the child is located
• Whether the child is in immediate danger
• Description of what you witness
• Why you are concerned
• Other information that might be helpful
• Your name, contact information, and relationship to the child
• Names of other people who might know the situation

Sometimes, information might not fall under mandated reporting, but an individual might still disclose it for safety or legal reasons.

Duty to Warn

Many therapists and other professionals will also report threats to harm self or others, known as duty to warn or duty to protect. In most states, this does not fall under mandated reporting. However, there is civil precedent indicating that a therapist can be held liable if a client discloses a plan to hurt themselves or someone else, and the therapist does not take steps to intervene.

This requirement is based on the legal case, Tarasoff vs Regents of the University of California, a 1976 case in which a client disclosed to his therapist that he intended to commit murder. The victim's family successfully sued the therapist for failing to protect the victim after the client carried out his plan.

Duty to warn can include contacting the potential victim if the information is available. It can also include contacting law enforcement about a threat.

If someone discloses that they are suicidal and have a plan or intent to end their life, the therapist might contact crisis or emergency services to ensure their safety.

Because duty to warn involves civil liability, it is separate from mandated reporting laws.

Court Orders

Professionals might be subject to a court order from a judge to disclose information. Refusing to comply with a court order is illegal, and defying a court order can lead to jail time. Judges might request information as part of criminal cases or child custody disputes. Court orders do not fall under mandated reporting laws.

What This Means For You

Mandated reporting aims to ensure the safety of vulnerable populations and prevent abuse. Check your government website to learn more about your state's mandated reporting laws. You can learn what circumstances require a report and which professionals and organizations are mandated reporters.

Tufford L, Lee B, Bogo M, et al. Decision-making and relationship competence when reporting suspected physical abuse and child neglect: An objective structured clinical evaluation .  Clin Soc Work J . 2021;49(2):256-270. doi:10.1007/s10615-020-00785-6

Idaho Department of Health and Welfare. Reporting neglect, abuse, or abandonment .

Tarasoff v. Regents of the University of California, 131 Cal. Rptr. 14 (Cal. 1976).

By Amy Marschall, PsyD Dr. Amy Marschall is an autistic clinical psychologist with ADHD, working with children and adolescents who also identify with these neurotypes among others. She is certified in TF-CBT and telemental health.

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States find a downside to mandatory reporting laws meant to protect children

Kristin Jones

More than 60 years ago, policymakers in Colorado embraced the idea that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The state's requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused or neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws in the nation.

Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment — including neglect, which now accounts for most reports — and have increased the number of professions required to report. In some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse or neglect.

But now there are efforts in Colorado and other states – including New York and California — to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, or Indigenous, or have members with disabilities.

"There's a long, depressing history based on the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting," says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester in New York. "There's now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children."

Seeking balance

Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorado's child protection ombudsman, oversees a task force to reexamine the state's mandatory reporting laws. She says the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.

"This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted," Villafuerte says. "I'm hoping it's the combination of these efforts that could make a difference."

Some critics worry that changes to the law could result in missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers on the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While it's rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also face civil liability or professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.

Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 in 3 children in the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services' Children's Bureau.

Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents or children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up in foster care.

In an overwhelming majority of investigations, no abuse or neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.

In Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% in the past decade and reached a record 117,762 last year, according to state data . Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline weren't counted as reports because they were requests for information or were about matters like child support or adult protection, say officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.

No surge in substantiated cases of abuse

The increase in reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals — including school and medical staff, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers — to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.

These calls don't reflect a surge in mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies in Colorado don't meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse or neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade.

While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported in January , there is evidence of harm. "Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color" — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse or neglect, the task force said.

The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate "the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting on under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities."

The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food or housing assistance.

Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.

That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelace's daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 in 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace's family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.

"Our biggest looming fear is, 'Are you going to take our children away?'" says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. "We're afraid to ask for help. It's keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare."

State and county human services officials said they could not comment on specific cases.

A 'warmline' to connect families to services

The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state's mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not "make a report solely due to a family/child's race, class or gender," nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income or clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely on the "disability status of the minor, parent or guardian," according to the group's draft recommendation.

The task force plans to recommend additional training for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, or "warmline," for cases in which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.

Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.

"I'm concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are in real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped," says Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.

The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience in the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year in the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes in 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.

Other places have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. In New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. In California, a state task force aimed at shifting "mandated reporting to community supporting" is planning recommendations similar to Colorado's .

Among those advocating for change are people with experience in the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad , who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.

"Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness," says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn't enough, she says. "We know what we need, and it's usually funding and resources."

Some of these resources — like affordable housing and child care — don't exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad says.

Other services are out there, but it's a matter of finding them. Lovelace says the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, in the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughter's disabilities. Their daughter is now in seventh grade and doing well.

None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. "I really think they didn't know about it."

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.

• Child abuse
• child neglect

Mandatory reporting was supposed to stop severe child abuse. It punishes poor families instead.

This article was published in partnership with ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive  ProPublica’s biggest stories  as soon as they’re published.

PHILADELPHIA — More than a decade before the Penn State University child sex abuse scandal broke, an assistant football coach told his supervisors that he had seen Jerry Sandusky molesting a young boy in the shower. When this was revealed during Sandusky’s criminal trial in 2012, it prompted public outcry: Why hadn’t anyone reported the abuse sooner?

In response, Pennsylvania lawmakers enacted sweeping reforms to prevent anything like it from ever happening again.

Most notably, they expanded the list of professionals required to report it when they suspect a child might be in danger, broadened the definition for what constitutes abuse and increased the criminal penalties for those who fail to report.

“Today, Pennsylvania says ‘No more’ to child abuse,” then-Gov. Tom Corbett declared as he signed the legislation into law in 2014.

A flood of unfounded reports followed, overwhelming state and local child protection agencies. The vast expansion of the child protection dragnet ensnared tens of thousands of innocent parents, disproportionately affecting families of color living in poverty. While the unintended and costly consequences are clear, there’s no proof that the reforms have prevented the most serious abuse cases, an NBC News and ProPublica investigation found. 

Instead, data and child welfare experts suggest the changes may have done the opposite.

The number of Pennsylvania children found to have been abused so severely that they died or were nearly killed has gone up almost every year since — from 96 in 2014 to 194 in 2021, according to state data . State child welfare officials say more vigilance in documenting severe cases of abuse likely contributed to the increase. But child safety advocates and researchers raised concerns that the surge of unfounded reports has overburdened the system, making it harder to identify and protect children who are truly in danger.

In the five years after the reforms took effect, the state’s child abuse hotline was inundated with more than 1 million reports of child maltreatment, state data shows. More than 800,000 of these calls were related not to abuse or serious neglect, but to lower-level neglect allegations often stemming from poverty, most of which were later dismissed as invalid by caseworkers.

The number of children reported as possible victims of abuse or serious neglect increased by 72% compared to the five years prior, triggering Child Protective Services investigations into the well-being of nearly 200,000 children from 2015 to 2019, according to a ProPublica and NBC News analysis of federal Department of Health and Human Services data . From this pool of reports, child welfare workers identified 6,000 more children who might have been harmed than in the five previous years. But for the vast majority of the 200,000 alleged victims — roughly 9 in 10 — county agencies dismissed the allegations as unfounded after inspecting families’ homes and subjecting parents and children to questioning.

The expanded reporting requirements were even less effective at detecting additional cases of sexual abuse. Some 42,000 children were investigated as possible sex abuse victims from 2015 to 2019 — an increase of 42% from the five years prior — but there was no increase in the number of substantiated allegations, the analysis of federal data showed. In other words, reforms enacted in response to a major sex abuse scandal led to thousands more investigations, but no increase in the number of children identified as likely victims.

Child welfare experts say these findings cast doubt on the effectiveness of the primary tool that states rely on to protect children: mandatory child abuse reporting. These policies, the bedrock of America’s child welfare system, were first implemented more than half a century ago in response to growing national awareness of child maltreatment. The thinking was simple: By making it a crime for certain professionals to withhold information about suspected abuse, the government could prevent vulnerable children from falling through the cracks.

Over the past decade, at least 36 states have enacted laws to expand the list of professionals required by law to report suspicions of child abuse or imposed new reporting requirements and penalties for failing to report, according to data compiled by the National Conference of State Legislatures , a group representing state governments.

Some legal experts and child welfare reform activists argue these laws have created a vast family surveillance apparatus, turning educators, health care workers, therapists and social services providers into the eyes and ears of a system that has the power to take children from their parents.

“I don’t think we have evidence that mandated reporting makes children safer,” said Kathleen Creamer, an attorney with Community Legal Services, a Philadelphia nonprofit that provides free representation to parents accused of abuse and neglect. “I actually think we have strong evidence that it puts child safety at risk because it makes parents afraid to seek help, and because it floods hotlines with frivolous calls, making it harder for caseworkers to identify families who really do need services.”

How America’s child welfare dragnet ensnares struggling families

• CPS workers search millions of homes a year. A mom who resisted paid a price .
• For Black families in Phoenix, child welfare investigations are a constant threat
• The ‘death penalty’ of child welfare: In 6 months, some parents lose their children forever.

In a yearlong investigation, ProPublica and NBC News are examining the extraordinary reach of America’s child welfare system and its disproportionate impact on the lives of low-income families of color. The stream of reports generated by mandatory reporting is so vast, and so unevenly applied, public health and social work researchers estimate that more than half of all Black children nationally will have been the subject of a child protective services investigation by the time they turn 18 — nearly double the rate of white children.

After a hotline report comes in, it’s the job of child welfare investigators to determine whether a child is truly in danger. These caseworkers aren’t held to the same legal or training standards as law enforcement, but they can wield significant power, ProPublica and NBC News found, sometimes pressuring their way into homes without court orders to comb through closets and pantries, looking for signs of what’s lacking.

Under this system, child welfare agencies investigate the families of 3.5 million children each year and take about 250,000 kids into protective custody, according to federal data. Fewer than 1 in 5 of these family separations are related to allegations of physical or sexual abuse, the original impetus behind mandatory reporting. Instead, the vast majority of removals are based on reports of child neglect, a broad range of allegations often tied to inadequate housing or a parent’s drug addiction.

In response, a growing movement of family lawyers, researchers and child welfare reform advocates have called for a radical change in the approach to child protection in America, starting with the abolition of mandatory reporting. This idea has grown in popularity among both progressive activists and conservatives who oppose what they call excessive government intrusion in the lives of families. Other critics support less dramatic reforms, such as limiting which professionals are required to report and providing better training for mandated reporters.

The fallout from Pennsylvania’s expansion of mandatory reporting has become something of a cautionary tale among those calling for a system overhaul. Even some proponents of the changes have begun to question their impact.

State Rep. Todd Stephens, a Republican who helped spearhead the post-Sandusky reforms, said the impact of the changes warranted closer examination. In response to NBC News and ProPublica’s findings, he said he would lead a legislative effort to take a “deep dive in the data” to ensure the laws are protecting children as intended.

But Stephens said he believes the legislation is working, citing the massive increase in hotline reports and the 6,000 additional children with substantiated findings of abuse or serious neglect over five years.

“The goal was, if people thought children were in trouble or in danger, we wanted the cavalry to come running,” Stephens said. “That’s 6,000 kids who are getting help who might not have otherwise.”

Child welfare experts, however, cautioned against drawing conclusions based on the increase in substantiated abuse cases because those are subjective determinations made by caseworkers that children were more likely than not to be at risk of being abused and do not indicate whether the findings were ultimately dismissed by a judge.

Dr. Rachel Berger, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh who served on a task force that paved the way for the 2014 reforms , said the state has not produced evidence to show the changes have made children safer.

In 2020, while testifying before the Pennsylvania House of Representatives , Berger warned lawmakers that the reforms “may have inadvertently made children less safe” by straining the system and siphoning resources away from genuine cases of abuse.

“We are continuing to tell mandated reporters, ‘Report, report, report,’ and nobody can handle it,” Berger said in an interview.

Jon Rubin, deputy secretary at the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services’ Office of Children, Youth and Families, which oversees the state’s ChildLine call center, said it’s “really hard to evaluate” whether the 2014 reforms succeeded in making children safer overall. Rubin said he’s aware of the concern that the changes overwhelmed the system and may have contributed to the increase in child abuse deaths. But he cautioned against drawing conclusions without considering other factors, such as the strain on the system caused by the fentanyl epidemic beginning in 2017.

Rubin said his agency is studying ways to reduce the number of hotline reports related to poverty and housing issues, in part by encouraging mandatory reporters to instead connect families directly with resources. The state has also made it a priority to keep struggling families together by providing access to services such as mental health counseling and parental support groups, Rubin said. He worries about the potential impact of more dramatic changes.

“How many children’s lives are we willing to risk to, as you said, abolish the system, to reduce the overreporting risk?” Rubin said. Would preventing unnecessary reports, he asked, be worth “one more child hurt or killed, five more children hurt or killed, 100 more children hurt or killed?”

But Richard Wexler, the executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, a Virginia-based advocacy group, said that this logic ignores the harm that comes with unnecessary government intrusion in the lives of innocent families. Simply having an investigation opened can be traumatic, experts say, and numerous studies show that separating young children from their parents leads to increased risk of depression , developmental delays, attachment issues and post-traumatic stress disorder.

It isn’t necessary to threaten educators, social workers, doctors and other professionals with criminal charges in order to protect children, Wexler argued.

“Abolishing mandatory reporting does not mean abolishing reporting,” he said. “Anybody can still call ChildLine. What it does, however, is put the decision back in the hands of professionals to exercise their judgment concerning when to pick up the phone.”

The cost of seeking help

April Lee, a Black mother of three in Philadelphia, said she has seen and experienced firsthand the way mandatory reporting and the prospect of child removals create a culture of fear in low-income communities.

In Philadelphia, the state’s most populous city, Black children were the focus of about 66% of reports to the city’s Department of Human Services, its child welfare agency, even though they make up about 42% of the child population, according to a 2020 report commissioned by the department.

Over time, Lee said, moms in neighborhoods like hers get used to having child welfare agents show up on their steps.

“It’s a shame,” she said. “You get to the point where it’s almost normalized that you’re going to have that knock on your door.”

Lee estimates that she’s personally had about 20 such reports filed against her in the two decades since she gave birth to her first child at the age of 15. In most instances, she said, the caseworkers didn’t leave her with paperwork, but she said the accusations ranged from inadequate housing to concerns over her son’s scraped knee after a tumble on the front porch.

The agency never discloses who files the reports, but Lee believes it was a call from a mandatory reporter that triggered the investigation that resulted in her children being taken away. In 2013, a year after the birth of her third child, Lee said, she was drugged at a bar and raped. In her struggle to cope with the trauma, she said, she confided in a doctor.

“I was honest,” Lee said. “Like ‘I’m f---ing struggling. I’m struggling emotionally.’” 

She suspects someone at the clinic where she sought mental health care made the hotline call, most likely, she said, believing that the city’s child welfare agency would be able to help.

The agency opened an investigation and determined that Lee — who at one point had left her three children with a friend for several days — was not adequately caring for her children. The agency took them into protective custody, according to court records reviewed by NBC News and ProPublica. Afterward, Lee said, she spiraled into drug addiction and homelessness.

At her lowest point, Lee slept on a piece of cardboard in the Kensington neighborhood, the epicenter of Philadelphia’s opioid crisis. It took two years to get clean, she said, and another three before she regained custody of all of her children.

Lee said people like to tell her she’s proof that the system works, but she disagrees. 

“My children still have deficits to this day due to that separation,” she said. “I still have deficits to this day due to that separation. I still hold my breath at certain door knocks. That separation anxiety is still alive and well in my family.”

Now Lee works as a client liaison at Community Legal Services, guiding parents through the system. The job is funded by a grant from the city agency that took her children. Virtually all of the mothers she works with have one thing in common, she said: They’re struggling to make ends meet.

“We see that in a lot of our cases,” Lee said. “You have someone that went to their doctor to say, ‘Hey, I relapsed.’ That’s a call to the ChildLine. Or you have a family that might go into a resource center saying, ‘Hey, we’re homeless.’ That’s a call to the ChildLine. You have children that show up to school without proper clothing. That’s a call to the ChildLine.”

But mandatory reporting, and the fear that it provokes, makes it harder for them to get the help they need.

“The solution to poverty,” Lee said, “should not be the removal of your children.”

Policies driven by outrage

In 1962, a pediatrician named C. Henry Kempe published a seminal paper identifying a new medical condition that he called “the battered-child syndrome.” Drawing on a survey of hospital reports nationwide and a review of medical records, Kempe warned that physical abuse had become a “significant cause of childhood disability and death” in America and that this violence often went unreported.

The paper led to widespread media attention and calls to address what some experts began calling the nation’s hidden child abuse epidemic. In the rush to take action, one solution emerged above all else: mandatory reporting.

Within four years of Kempe’s paper, every state had passed some form of mandatory child abuse reporting. In 1974, despite a lack of research into the effects of these new policies, the approach was codified into federal law when Congress enacted the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, which requires states to have mandatory reporting provisions in order to receive federal grants for preventing child abuse.

It became conventional wisdom among child welfare policymakers that more reporting and investigations would make children safer. States gradually expanded reporting requirements in the decades that followed, adding ever more professionals — including animal control officers, computer technicians and dentists — to the list. They also expanded the definition of child maltreatment to include emotional abuse and neglect.

But critics say these policy decisions too often have been guided by public outrage and politics, not by data and research.

“Reporting has been our one response to concerns about child abuse,” said Dr. Mical Raz, a physician and professor of history at the University of Rochester who has studied the impact of mandatory child abuse reporting. “Now we have quite a bit of data that shows that more reporting doesn’t result in better identification of children at risk and is not associated with better outcomes for children, and in some cases may cause harm to families and communities.”

The Sandusky scandal, Raz said, demonstrates how a high-profile atrocity and public outcry can drive policy decisions.

The longtime Penn State assistant football coach was convicted in 2012 on 45 counts of child sexual abuse tied to the repeated rape and molestation of boys over a 15-year period. An investigation commissioned by the Penn State Board of Trustees found that several university officials, including legendary Nittany Lions football coach Joe Paterno, had known about allegations of sex abuse against Sandusky as early as 1998, but had shown a “total and consistent disregard” for “the safety and welfare of Sandusky’s child victims.”

In response, Pennsylvania passed a raft of reforms. It clarified and expanded the definition of abuse and added tens of thousands of additional people to the state’s roster of mandated reporters — which now includes virtually any adult who works or volunteers with children. It also increased the criminal consequences for failing to report child abuse, with penalties ranging from a misdemeanor to a second-degree felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Although such prosecutions are rare, child welfare officials said the threat is effective in driving more professionals to report.

But the state failed to include additional funding to handle the anticipated increase in hotline calls and investigations, despite warnings from county officials that the reforms “were going to put a massive strain on their workers and would require additional resources,” according to a 2017 report from the state auditor general.

Those warnings proved prescient. In early 2015, after the changes went into effect and thousands of additional reports flooded Pennsylvania’s child abuse hotline, state officials estimated 4 in 10 callers were placed on hold for so long that they hung up before getting a caseworker on the line.

Some ChildLine workers reported an uptick in calls from mandated reporters who openly acknowledged they did not really believe that a child was in danger. Haven Evans, now the director of programs at Pennsylvania Family Support Alliance, which trains mandatory reporters across the state, was working at the state’s hotline center that year.

“There were a lot of mandatory reporters who would even admit on the phone call that they were making this report because they were concerned with the changes in the law and the penalties being increased,” Evans said. “They just wanted to, for lack of a better word, cover their butt.”

In the months and years that followed, the state added funding and workers and upgraded call center technology to keep up with the deluge. But taking a report is just the first step of the process — what some refer to as the child welfare system’s “front door” — and not enough attention has been paid to studying whether the system as a whole leads to better outcomes, said Cathleen Palm, founder of the Center for Children’s Justice, a nonprofit in Bernville, Pennsylvania, that advocates for government interventions to protect children.

In 2018, Palm came out against proposed legislation to further expand mandatory reporting that had been introduced in the wake of the Catholic clergy sex abuse scandal and grand jury investigation. Even though Palm is herself a survivor of child sexual abuse, her calls for a formal study before passing more reforms made her a target of attacks, she said.

“I literally got called by a senior official at the attorney general’s office, who called me screaming at me, equating me to a friend of the pedophile,” Palm said. “I was floored. Do you have any sense of who you’re talking to?”

The following year, state lawmakers acted anyway, passing a law that expanded when failure to report is a felony .

The same dynamic has played out across the country: High-profile media coverage of child abuse deaths and child sexual abuse have created overwhelming political pressure to ramp up mandatory reporting, in red and blue states alike.

Eighteen states have gone so far as to implement universal child abuse reporting requirements , deputizing every adult in the state as a mandatory reporter. But a 2017 study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that universal reporting requirements led to more unfounded reports while failing to detect additional confirmed cases of child maltreatment.

Kelley Fong, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, has done extensive research into the impacts of mandatory reporting policies. When Fong interviewed dozens of impoverished mothers in Rhode Island and later Connecticut , they described how mandated reporters are “omnipresent” and how the fear of a call to Child Protective Services leads some to avoid seeking public assistance.

But when she spoke to professionals who had filed reports against parents, Fong found a disconnect.

“Almost to a person, every single mandated reporter said, ‘I reported because I wanted to help the family,’” Fong said. “For the most part, these mandated reporters are in their jobs because they want to help people, they want to improve conditions for children and families. And so here is this agency that offers them this possibility of getting help to parents and children.”

Fong compared this approach to sending armed police officers to assist people struggling with homelessness, mental illness and addiction — a practice that’s drawn increased scrutiny since 2020’s nationwide demonstrations for racial justice and police reform. But while there’s growing awareness of the consequences of what activists view as the overpolicing of Black communities, Fong said fewer people have applied that same critical lens to child welfare.

That’s starting to change.

In 2019, in response to concerns that Massachusetts wasn’t doing enough to protect children, the state legislature voted to create a special commission to study how best to expand mandatory reporting requirements. For two years, the commission was progressing toward that goal — until they agreed to hear public comments on their plans. 

During four hours of virtual testimony in April 2021, the commission heard from dozens of parents, social workers, legal experts and reform activists, most of whom expressed deep concerns about the potential harms of expanded reporting requirements. Raz was among those who testified, citing as a warning the dysfunction that followed the Pennsylvania reforms.

Afterward, members of the commission said they were “shocked” and “taken aback” to learn about potential problems associated with expanding the child welfare system. As a result, when the commission delivered its final report to lawmakers in June 2021, it made no formal policy recommendations.

Instead, it called for further study of the unintended impacts of mandatory reporting.

The strain on Philadelphia’s system

Few places were harder hit by Pennsylvania’s surge of new child abuse reports after 2015 than Philadelphia.

Kimberly Ali, commissioner of the Philadelphia Department of Human Services, the city’s child welfare agency, acknowledged in an interview with NBC News that the change in the state’s mandatory reporting policies put a strain on Philadelphia’s system. She said the local hotline managed by her department “imploded” after the Sandusky reforms. It took the agency years to recover.

“That was a difficult time at the Department of Human Services, just trying to manage the number of calls and the number of investigations,” Ali said.

In a city where nearly a quarter of residents live in poverty, the deluge of new reports disproportionately involved Black families and led to a sharp increase in the number of Philadelphia children being taken from their parents. In 2017, the city’s child welfare agency removed the most children per capita among the 10 largest cities in the U.S. — at three times the rate of New York and four times that of Chicago, according to data compiled by the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.

Five of those children belonged to Lisa Mothee.

On Aug. 21, 2017, a mandatory reporter employed by the Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia called in a hotline report flagging that Mothee’s newborn baby had tested positive for opioids. The hospital later reported that Mothee had also failed to provide her baby with proper medical care, because she declined vaccinations and other medical screenings typically provided to newborns, according to court records.

At a court hearing a month later, Mothee, who is Black, told a judge that she had taken a Percocet to cope with pain late in her pregnancy. She explained that she’d stopped consenting to vaccines after one of her children had an adverse reaction several years earlier, which she believed was her right as a parent. After a lawyer for the city’s child welfare agency acknowledged in court that they didn’t have reason to believe Mothee’s children were in danger, she figured the case would be dismissed.

Instead, the judge ordered Mothee and the father of four of her children to be handcuffed and held in court for several hours while child protection agents picked up all five of her kids from school and a babysitter.

“What? No!” Mothee called out, according to a court transcript. “You can’t take my kids! You can’t take my kids!”

Eight months would pass before a different judge ordered her children to be returned . Years later, Mothee said she’s still struggling with the trauma of the ordeal. “It’s like a death,” she said. “You never get over that feeling.”

Mothee’s case was part of a statewide trend post-Sandusky.

The number of Pennsylvania children reported as possible victims of serious medical neglect — a blanket term describing a parent’s failure to provide adequate medical care — nearly quadrupled after the reforms went into effect in 2015, triggering Child Protective Services investigations into the well-being of about 9,600 children over a five-year span, according to the ProPublica and NBC News analysis of federal data. 

This surge followed a change in how the state defined when neglect, including medical neglect, can be considered a form of child abuse. Lawmakers lowered the threshold from any failure to care for a child that endangers their “life or development,” to any failure that “threatens a child’s well-being.” Critics say the change has usurped parents’ right to make medical decisions for their children and has punished people who lack easy and affordable access to health care.

Mothee’s case was among several cited in a scathing report issued in April by a special committee of the Philadelphia City Council that detailed the unintended consequences of mandatory child abuse reporting and alleged failures at Philadelphia’s child welfare agency. 

City Councilmember David Oh pushed for the creation of the special committee after his own brush with a mandatory reporter in 2018. A hospital worker at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia had phoned in a hotline report after Oh, a Republican and the city’s first Asian-American councilmember, brought his son to the emergency room with a broken collarbone. Oh explained that his boy had been injured while practicing martial arts, but the hospital social worker said she had no choice but to notify the city, triggering what Oh viewed as a senseless investigation into a report that was ultimately deemed unfounded.

Afterward, Oh said, he heard from dozens of Philadelphia parents, including Mothee, who’d gone through similar ordeals. 

Ali, the DHS commissioner, said her agency has reduced the city’s foster care rolls by about 29% since 2017, with an increased focus on providing families with services rather than removing children. But Oh said not enough has been done to mitigate the fear created by mandatory reporting, especially in poorer Black communities.

“In those neighborhoods, everyone knows about mandated reporters,” Oh said during an interview at his office. “So when your child falls off a bike, you’ve got to think, ‘Do we take him to the hospital or not?’”

Oh’s committee made several recommendations for reforms — including a call for the state to abolish mandatory reporting.

“They have a system where everyone pulls a fire alarm anytime they feel like there’s a potential for fire, and theoretically it’s great because we’re going to catch every fire before it begins,” Oh said. “But how it’s worked out is all our firefighters are running around to false alarms, and now buildings are burning and people are dying. It’s a bad system.”

'Mandatory reporters into mandatory supporters'

Some experts argue that the best way to reduce unfounded reports of child abuse and neglect is not by abolishing mandatory reporting, but by doing a better job of training professionals on when to report — and when it’s better to provide help to a family in need instead.

In Pennsylvania, medical professionals are required to complete a two-hour mandatory reporter training course every two years; other professionals must take a three-hour training every five years.

But Dr. Benjamin Levi, a pediatrician and former director of the Center for the Protection of Children, a research and policy group at Penn State Children’s Hospital, said such training programs typically lack a clear explanation of the “reasonable suspicion” of abuse that should trigger a report.

“‘Reasonable suspicion’ is a feeling — they don’t even define it,” said Levi, who developed an alternative training for mandatory reporters to help fill in the gaps.

“If you increase mandated reporting, and you don’t make sure that mandated reporters know what to report and what not to report, you’ve just made the problem worse.”

Educators, the largest source of child abuse reports nationally, in particular have struggled to correctly identify children in need of help. From 2015 to 2019 in Pennsylvania, 24 out of 25 children referred to Child Protective Services by education professionals had their cases dismissed by case workers as unsubstantiated — but only after children and parents had been subjected to questioning and home searches.

Ali, the head of the Philadelphia child welfare agency, said her department has heard from educators who felt unable to help struggling families because they feared potential criminal charges for not reporting to the abuse hotline. With the support of a federal grant, her department plans to create an alternative hotline that mandatory reporters can call when they believe a family is in need but don’t suspect children are in danger.

Adopting the language of reform activists, Ali said the goal is “turning mandatory reporters into mandatory supporters.”

But Benita Williams, former operations director of Philadelphia’s child welfare agency, warned against more radical change, stressing that mandatory reporters should never hesitate to make a report in cases of suspected child abuse.

“Just report,” said Williams, now executive director of the Philadelphia Children’s Alliance, which supports victims of child sexual abuse. “If you are not sure, report and let the professional screen that out. Don’t try to become a social worker.”

Phoebe Jones, who helps lead DHS-Give Us Back Our Children, a group that advocates on behalf of Philadelphia mothers and grandmothers who’ve had children taken from them for issues related to poverty and domestic violence, argues that the real solution is to address the issues underlying most ChildLine reports, by providing parents and caregivers with a universal basic income to ensure they have what they need to care for children.

“Rather than taking children from their mothers and paying foster parents to care for them,” Jones said, “why don’t we invest that money in families?”

Mike Hixenbaugh reported from Philadelphia; Suzy Khimm reported from Washington, D.C.; Agnel Philip reported from New York.

Mike Hixenbaugh is a senior investigative reporter for NBC News, based in Maryland, and author of "They Came for the Schools." 

Suzy Khimm is a national investigative reporter for NBC News based in Washington, D.C.

Agnel Philip is a data reporter for ProPublica. 

• Made by History

Why Mandatory Reporting Doesn’t Keep Children Safe

Fifty years ago today , President Richard Nixon signed the bipartisan Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA). Designed to address rising concerns over children being hurt in their homes, CAPTA’s primary impact was setting federal standards for what would become the primary policy approach to addressing child abuse: mandatory reporting.

But CAPTAs legacy is neither prevention nor treatment of child abuse. That’s because it does not address the root factors that make children less safe and fails to adequately provide the resources children need to thrive. Instead, it focuses primarily on reporting child abuse. Consequently, the act encourages states to spend considerably more on surveillance, investigation, prosecution, and family separation than on the provision of community- and family-strengthening resources.

At the time of its passage in 1974, there was little data about what might prevent child abuse. Officials focused on what happened when adults who might have stepped in to protect children, including doctors, nurses, and teachers, failed to do so. Early intervention, they thought, could help. By the mid to late 1960s, all states had passed laws identifying certain professionals required to report suspected harm to children. These state mandatory reporting laws were passed hurriedly, and without evidence that they were effective.

Senator Walter Mondale, Minnesota Democrat and longtime champion of children and families, was the main sponsor of CAPTA. Mondale, still smarting from the 1971 Nixon veto of his bipartisan universal early childhood education bill, was keen to create a bill that Nixon could support. As Mondale quipped , “Not even Richard Nixon is in favor of child abuse!”

Read More: The U.S. Almost Had Universal Childcare 50 Years Ago. The Same Attacks Might Kill It Today

To help steer a bill that could garner broad support, Mondale avoided discussions of poverty, racism, and other social risk factors for child abuse, even as these had already been mapped out in detail by the early 1970s. Large-scale studies showed that joblessness, homelessness, and even a lack of telephone in the home were risk factors for harm to children. But Mondale discouraged witnesses who raised these issues. When child abuse researcher David Gil noted the higher incidence of child abuse in poor families, for instance, Mondale steered his questions elsewhere and noted that this was “ not a poverty problem, this is a national problem .” In the early 1970s, a backlash against anti-poverty programs, as well as a sense that the public had soured on civil rights initiatives, informed Mondale’s approach.

Mondale succeeded in garnering support for CAPTA, and Nixon signed it into law. But it was a pyrrhic victory, coming at the price of obscuring the risk factors known to make children less safe and squandering an opportunity to argue for more supports for struggling families.

CAPTA’s main legacy was setting a federal standard for mandatory reporting, which states had to meet to be eligible for grants. States then revised their statutes, rather than leave money on the table.

But reporting and the investigations they helped fuel didn’t address the core problems. As early as 1973, a child welfare agency in New York made the fairly obvious observation that investigations in themselves are not useful unless they lead to more services.

Additionally, many researchers raised concern over the harms of oversurveillance and the singular focus on reporting promoted by CAPTA. In 1975, the authors of a federally funded study of reporting laws sounded the alarm, mapping the transformations they themselves had undergone as they studied the topic.

Initially the authors had believed that the best approach was to require broad reporting. However, as they evaluated the large-scale data they had collected, they realized that the act was “creating a system of reporting , sanctioned and encouraged by the law, which could invade and harm the lives of parents and children as easily as help them.” Furthermore, the authors worried that the overemphasis on reporting distracted from the societal problems that made children less safe—usually related to poverty, lack of child care, lack of access to health care, and lack of housing.

Read More: Black Families Are Outraged About Family Separation Within the U.S. It's Time to Listen to Them

The authors’ research led them to reach politically unpopular and unexpected conclusions. As a result, their work was largely ignored. Thus, one of the most comprehensive reviews of data about mandated reporting was effectively discarded and an opportunity to rethink our approach was lost. Instead, an evidence-free approach prevailed.

Policymakers doubled down on the reporting approach, adding a punitive element, also not supported by evidence. In 1975, the Education Commission of the States, an education policy think-tank, worked to revise their earlier model statutes based on CAPTA requirements. A vigorous debate erupted over whether model legislation should include penalties for failure to report. Head Start architect and longtime government administrator Jule Sugerman recommended against penalties for failure to report. Penalties, Sugerman worried, might lead to unnecessary reports and could ultimately deter families from seeking the care they needed. Others raised similar objections.

Yet the task force decided to recommend significant penalties for non-reporting, explaining that there was “no substantial evidence to support the argument against the penalties.” There was, of course, no evidence to support these policies either. And yet states adopted this approach and have kept these penalties on the books, despite the lack of evidence of their effectiveness.

Over the years, the evidence has mounted against reporting requirements as the primary mechanism for addressing child abuse. Policies that expand reporting are not associated with more accurate detection of children at risk of harm , and states in which all adults are legally required to report are no better at detecting child abuse than those in which the mandate is narrower.

Reporting requirements are also quite broad, undermining their effectiveness. Most reports deal with manifestations of poverty and substance use , and a small sliver of cases are substantiated physical and sexual abuse. Families may be reported to authorities if they are late for daycare pick up, if a child is playing unsupervised or waiting in the car unattended, or if a family misses repeated medical appointments for a lack of transportation.

Concerned adults often file reports because they want children to get access to services, or mistakenly believe that a report will result in a solution to an immediate crisis. But the majority of investigations end without resulting in the provision of new services to families. In fact, in many states reports of child abuse and maltreatment increased at precisely same time that these states were decreasing funding for state and local services. Families often derived no material benefit from a report about hunger or homelessness, for example. In the words of the 1990 report of the United State Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect, it was “ far easier to pick up one’s phone to report one’s neighbor” than it was to pick up the phone and reach out to offer and provide help.

Advocates have spoken in detail of the harm their families have experienced from needless investigations and coercive interventions. A wealth of evidence shows that mandatory reporting laws disproportionately target poor families and families of color, and often make children less safe—by removing children and placing them in unsafe situations, or by discouraging parents from seeking care or partaking in programs that could offer valuable supports.

Read More: One in Ten Black Children in America Are Separated From Their Parents by the Child-Welfare System. A New Book Argues That’s No Accident

CAPTA’s requirements to make “ plans of safe care” for children of mothers who use substances has contributed to discriminatory drug-testing policies, investigations, and removal of newborn babies from their mothers because of drug panics and criminalization. But drug tests are not parenting tests , and family separation is not family support.

Certainly, in any case of abuse an observer can and should report if they are concerned about a child’s safety. That is distinct from federal policies that require reporting of a broad array of situations, many of which are not child abuse, and could be better addressed with provision of supports and resources—something supported by the evidence .

It’s time for a paradigm shift. On its 50th birthday, we should reevaluate the reporting-focused priorities set into place by CAPTA, and work to prevent and treat child abuse through evidence-based policies that support families.

Mical Raz is a practicing physician and a historian of health policy at the University of Rochester. She is the author of Abusive Policies: How the American Child Welfare System Lost Its Way.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here . Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors .

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Abuse stops with us.

We’re taking action to protect the vulnerable from abuse, from children to the elderly and everyone in between..

Abuse stops with us. The National Association of Mandated Reporters (NAMR) represents the largest network of professionals dedicated to identifying, reporting, and stopping abuse at all stages of life, from child abuse to intimate partner violence, elder abuse, and more.

NAMR’s membership is composed of educators, school personnel, care providers, medical professionals, social services professionals, human resource professionals, law enforcement, clergy, and other professionals who regularly interact with vulnerable populations. Join NAMR to stay current with mandated reporting laws in your state and help save lives.

Standards & Certification

Mandated reporting requirements vary from state to state. we’re advocating for standardized training, reporting, and certifications for mandated reporters in order to equally protect the vulnerable in every state across the nation., national training standards, standardized training requirements for all mandated reporters in every state., national reporting standards, standardized reporting requirements for all instances of abuse in every state., national certifications, standardized training certificates issued for all professionals in every state..

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Mandated Reporter Laws

2021 bills that strengthen child abuse laws in the us.

Bipartisan efforts to strengthen the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) and other related bills were introduced in 2021 as representatives from both parties seek to end the epidemic of child abuse and neglect in the U.S. Here are the bills introduced in 2021 to protect children: H.R. 485: Stronger Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act Introduced by Rep. Scott, Robert C. "Bobby" [D-VA-3] Passed House (03/16/2021) H.R. 485 reauthorizes through FY2027 and revises the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act and the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment and Adoption Reform Act of 1978 to expand services for preventing and treating child abuse. The bill requires the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to establish uniform national standards for tracking and reporting child fatalities and near fatalities resulting from maltreatment, and develop an electronic interstate data exchange system that allows states to share information from their child abuse and neglect registries with other states. The bill also addresses child abuse and neglect related to families impacted by substance use disorders, racial bias in the child protective services system, and child sexual abuse. The bill also ...

H.R. 485: The Stronger Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act

Child abuse and neglect is a pervasive public health problem that continues to affect millions of children across the country. In 2021, H.R 485: The Stronger Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act was introduced to prevent this crisis from worsening. H.R 485: The Stronger Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act Following significant declines in the rate of child abuse and neglect across the 1990s and 2000s, the rate of child maltreatment has ticked up in recent years as the opioid and COVID-19 epidemics have devastated families and communities across the country. The number of children receiving an investigation or response from child protective services agencies and the number of children who have died as a result of child abuse and neglect has risen steadily over the past decade. The Stronger Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act is a bipartisan proposal that will help states address the recent rise in child abuse and neglect by providing strategic funding to build networks of prevention services designed to strengthen families and to improve the quality of child protective services. Who Introduced H.R. 485? H.R. 485 was introduced in ...

Essential Information on Arkansas Mandated Reporter Laws

Throughout the United States, certain individuals are required to report suspected abuse of children and adults depending on their profession. The consequences of failing to report can vary depending on where you work, making it important to thoroughly understand mandated reporting requirements in your area.  If you're a professional in Arkansas, make sure you have a thorough understanding of the state’s mandated reporting laws and how they impact your profession. When Was Mandated Reporting of Abuse First Required in Arkansas? The requirement for states to designate certain individuals as mandated reporters of child abuse dates back to the passage of the Federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) in 1974. CAPTA requires states to select certain individuals as mandated reporters of suspected incidences of child abuse or neglect.  In Arkansas, the professions that are required to report child abuse are outlined in A.C.A. § 12-18-402, dating back to 2009 with several updates in years since. Similarly, the push to require certain individuals to report elder abuse has long been a subject of national importance. By 1981, 83% of states indicated that they supported ...

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Understanding a Nurse’s Role as a Mandated Reporter

What Is a Mandated Reporter?

• Nurses as Mandated Reporters
• Identify Abuse and/or Neglect
• Tips for Caring for Patients

Resources for Nurses

• Resources for Survivors of Abuse

Are you ready to earn your online nursing degree?

The stark reality in 21st-century America is that child abuse is reported to authorities every ten seconds . During the time they are being trafficked, 30-88% of survivors of human trafficking see a healthcare provider. In addition, 10 million men and women are abused by an intimate partner every year.

Would you know your responsibility as a nurse and mandated reporter if you suspected a patient was potentially trapped in these dangerous circumstances? It is crucial to understand the actions to take when faced when suspecting abuse or neglect. This guide explores the legal definition and responsibilities of a mandated reporter, how to identify abuse and neglect, and how registered nurses can care for patients who have experienced such maltreatment.

According to the National Association of Mandated Reporters (NAMR), mandated reporters are “people required by law to report suspected or known instances of abuse,” including “known or suspected abuse or neglect relating to children, elders, or dependent adults.” Intimate partner violence (IPV) and the abuse of both dependent adults and adults with disabilities also fall within the realm of the mandated reporter.

Currently, 47 states have designated professions wherein workers are mandated to report child maltreatment, as well as the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands.

Most every individual who works with elders is required to report suspected abuse in all states. In California, even those caring for elders without compensation are responsible for reporting.

“IPV, also known as domestic abuse, doesn’t have the same legislative requirements as other types of abuse,” states the NAMR. “In most instances, IPV reporting falls under injury by firearm or assault/abuse requirements for health practitioners. In California, for example, any health practitioner providing services in a health facility, clinic, or physician’s office who knows or reasonably suspects that a patient is the victim of assaultive or abusive conduct or a firearm injury is generally required to make a report.”

With the abuse of dependent adults or adults with disabilities, NAMR explains that every state other than New York stipulates mandated reporter requirements for this vulnerable population. However, 15 states have universal reporting and some states “provide broad definitions of who should report (e.g. all medical personnel) making it important that professionals review the statute for their own state.”

What Responsibilities Do Nurses Have as Mandated Reporters?

Like all healthcare professionals, every nurse bears the ethical and legal responsibility of following regulations as mandated reporters in their state. What nurses are required to report — and the legal forms — also vary by state.

No matter how emotionally triggering or disturbing a situation, nurses must maintain an objective stance when completing documentation of suspected or actual neglect or abuse. Opinions, emotions, and judgments of either the survivor or perpetrator should be left out of any legally binding report.

If a mandated reporter fails to report abuse , they face significant consequences. For example, Florida may charge the individual with a felony and a fine of up to $1 million. Forty states label the failure to report as a misdemeanor. Other states may elect to upgrade the charge to a felony in certain cases. Employers may also receive penalties for obstructing staff member reports.

In addition, false reporting carries a variety of penalties depending on the state. In Florida, Illinois, Tennessee, and Texas, such an action is treated as a felony. Meanwhile, California, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, and Nebraska impose no such penalties.

For more details, ChildWelfare.gov offers a state-by-state listing of mandated reporter regulations.

How To Identify Abuse and Neglect in Patients

When interacting with patients, identifying abuse and neglect is an important aspect of nursing assessment. Whether human trafficking or another form of abuse and neglect, the nurse plays a pivotal role as a frontline advocate who bears the legal and ethical responsibility to document and report what is observed or perceived.

Many survivors of human trafficking seek medical care during the period in which they are being exploited. Signs of human trafficking may include, but are not limited to:

• The patient does not have control of their money, identification, or passport.
• The patient might tell you they are visiting the area but cannot offer details about arrival or departure dates, an address, or a phone number.
• They display closed body language or appear withdrawn and submissive.
• The patient might be anxious, fearful, and depressed.
• They are vague about their address or where they live.
• The patient is malnourished; has unexplained bruises, burns, or injuries; or may have evidence of untreated sexually transmitted diseases.

When assessing for elder abuse, the nurse may choose to use an assessment tool, such as the Elder Abuse Suspicion Index . This index directs the clinician to ask the following questions of the patient while noting that a positive response to at least one question has a sensitivity of 47% and specificity of 75% for elder abuse.

• Has anyone prevented you from getting food, clothes, medication, glasses, hearing aids or medical care or from being with people you wanted to be with?
• Have you been upset because someone talked to you in a way that made you feel shamed or threatened?
• Has anyone tried to force you to sign papers or to use your money against your will?
• Has anyone made you afraid, touched you in ways that you did not want or hurt you physically?

Signs of child abuse may include:

• A lack of supervision by a responsible adult
• A withdrawn, depressed, apathetic, or passive demeanor
• Unaddressed medical issues, bruises, cuts, and burns
• A parent and child who rarely look at one another, or otherwise obvious parental indifference
• A statement by the child that they are always alone or that no one takes care of them

An assessment of abuse, neglect, trafficking, or exploitation is subtle in nature. The nurse must use communication, empathy, emotional intelligence, and motivational interviewing skills to make an objective assessment. They provide accurate documentation and follow up with the patient.

Tips for Caring for Patients Who Have Experienced Abuse and/or Neglect

Caring for patients who have experienced abuse or neglect requires thoughtful, compassionate, and highly professional care.

• The nurse must remember that the individual who has experienced abuse may feel shame, guilt, or embarrassment. Both adults and children may feel responsible for what occurred, no matter how improbable or illogical that may seem.
• Listening is one of the most powerful things you can do. A nurse with highly developed skills in listening, motivational interviewing, and emotional intelligence can bring the patient comfort.
• Although it may be difficult, the nurse should remain objective and neutral in terms of both their communication with the patient and documentation of the facts, no matter how abhorrent the treatment suffered by the patient.
• It is essential to reassure the patient that whatever reaction they are having to trauma is to be expected. Present them with access to trustworthy organizations and professionals who can walk with them through recovery.

The Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN) website features a database of state regulations regarding the reporting of sex crimes. It showcases important information for laypeople, healthcare providers, and other professionals. In addition, the American Medical Association offers support for providers who find themselves in situations involving suspected abuse.

Nursing and Mandated Reporting FAQ

Why is mandatory reporting important in nursing.

As the largest segment of the healthcare workforce, nurses are the lifeblood of the healthcare system. The most trusted profession in the U.S. as evidenced by the Gallup Poll , nurses serve as advocates, protectors, and witnesses for vulnerable patients in need of professional, legal, ethical, and moral support in the face of abuse and neglect.

What is the nurse’s responsibility if there is a suspicion of abuse?

Individual state governments dictate a nurse’s legal responsibility to report suspected abuse. The facility, agency, or organization employing the nurse may also have its own internal documentation and reporting policies as well.

What types of abuse are nurses mandated to report?

Depending on state regulations, nurses must report a variety of cases, including elder abuse, child abuse and neglect, the abuse of persons with disabilities, and those who have experienced sexual abuse.

How should the nurse documented the abuse?

Documentation of actual or suspected abuse is a crucial action to be taken by a nurse. A nurse must state the facts of the case and leave all feelings, judgments, and opinions aside.

National Council on Aging

Childwelfare.gov, north american council on adoptable children, resources for survivors of abuse and neglect, rape, abuse, and incest national network, the national association to end child abuse and neglect, adult survivors of child abuse.

Whether you’re looking to get your pre-licensure degree or taking the next step in your career, the education you need could be more affordable than you think. Find the right nursing program for you.

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Mandatory Reporters

Children and dependent adults in Iowa deserve the greatest possible protection from abuse. The Department of Health and Human Services strives to achieve this through encouraging reports when abuse is suspected, prompt assessment of these reports, and working with families and supports to assist in providing a safe and stable home environment.

Mandatory reporters are essential partners in protecting children and dependent adults from abuse. As professionals who have frequent contact with children or dependent adults, mandatory reporters are trained to identify the signs that a child or and dependent adult may have suffered abuse or neglect. 

2023 Law Changes Impacting Child and Dependent Adult Welfare

Iowa Child Abuse Registry

ATTENTION :  If you are an employee of a Long-Term Care (LTC) Facility, please review your employer's internal policies and procedures for additional clarification on your federal requirements for mandatory abuse reporting.

ATENCIÓN : Si usted es empleado de un Long-Term Care (LTC) Facility, revise las políticas y procedimientos internos de su empleador para obtener aclaraciones adicionales sobre sus requisitos federales para la notificación obligatoria de abusos.

Mandatory Reporter

Mandatory reporters are required to make an oral report of suspected abuse within 24 hours when they reasonably believe a child or dependent adult has suffered abuse (in accordance with Iowa Code section 232.69 and IAC 441—176.4) 

Iowa Code section 232.69  defines some professionals as mandatory reporters of child abuse and  Iowa Code section 235B.3(2)  defines some professionals as mandatory reporters of dependent adult abuse.

Online Training

If you have any technical questions or experience any issues regarding Mandatory Reporter training, please email [email protected] .

Mandatory Reporter Help Guide

Please  sign in here  to access all Mandatory Reporter Training. Once a participant signs in or creates an account, they will be routed to a welcome page to select the training they need.

Complete the full 2-hour course(s) if this is your first time completing the Mandatory Reporter Training provided by HHS or if your current certification has expired:

• DS 168 Dependent Adult Abuse Mandatory Reporter Training
• DS 169 Child Abuse Mandatory Reporter Training

If you have previously completed the full 2-hour course(s), DS 168 Dependent Adult Abuse Mandatory Reporter Training and/or DS 169 Child Abuse Mandatory Reporter Training and your current certification has not expired, you are eligible for the 1-hour recertification course(s):

• DS 170 Dependent Adult Abuse Mandatory Reporter Recertification Training
• DS 171 Child Abuse Mandatory Reporter Recertification Training

Inicie sesión aquí  para acceder a todas las versiones en español de la Capacitación para Denunciantes Obligatorios. Una vez que un participante inicia sesión o crea una cuenta, será dirigido a una página de bienvenida para seleccionar la capacitación que necesita.

Como alternativa lingüística, las capacitaciones incluyen subtítulos en español del audio del idioma principal de la presentación. La opción de subtítulos en español puede ser activada por el usuario dentro de cada una de las capacitaciones.

Complete el (los) curso(s) de 2 horas si esta es la primera vez que completa la Capacitación para Denunciantes Obligatorios provista por el HHS o si su certificación actual ha vencido:

• Español DS 168 Capacitación para denunciantes obligatorios de abuso de adultos dependientes
• Español DS 169 Capacitación para denunciantes obligatorios de abuso infantil

Si previamente completó los cursos de 2 horas, DS 168 Capacitación para denunciantes obligatorios de abuso de adultos dependientes y/o DS 169 Capacitación para denunciantes obligatorios de abuso infantil y su certificación actual no ha vencido, usted es elegible para el (los) curso(s) de recertificación de 1 hora:

• Español DS 170 Capacitación de recertificación para denunciantes obligatorios de abuso de adultos dependientes
• Español DS 171 Capacitación de recertificación para denunciantes obligatorios de abuso infantil

Child Abuse

The Department of Health and Human Services has the legal authority to conduct an assessment of child abuse when it is alleged that:

• A child is defined in Iowa Code section 232.68 as any person under the age of 18 years.

The child is subjected to one or more of the categories of child abuse defined in Iowa Code section 232.68:

• Physical abuse
• Mental injury
• Sexual abuse
• Prostitution of a child
• Presence of illegal drugs in a child's body
• Denial of critical care
• Dangerous substance
• Bestiality in the presence of a child
• Allows access to a registered sex offender
• Allows access to obscene materials
• Child Sex Trafficking
• a person responsible for the care of the child; or
• a person 14 years or older who resides in a home with the child, if the allegation is sexual abuse; or
• a person who engages in or allows sex trafficking.

Child Abuse Policy

Child Abuse Laws - Reporting, Assessment, and Rehabilitation

A perpetrator of child abuse must be a person responsible for the care of a child, a person 14 years or older who resides in a home with the child, if the allegation is sexual abuse, or a person who engages in or allows child sex trafficking.

A person responsible for the care of a child is defined in Iowa Code 232.68 as one of the following:

• Parent, guardian, or foster parent.
• A relative or any other person with whom the child resides and who assumes care or supervision of the child, without reference to the length of time or continuity of such residence.
• An employee or agent of any public or private facility providing care for a child, including an institution, hospital, health care facility, group home, mental health center, residential treatment center, shelter care facility, detention center, or child care facility.
• Any person providing care for a child, but with whom the child does not reside, without reference to the duration of the care.
• A person who assumes responsibility for the care or supervision of the child may assume such responsibility through verbal or written agreement, or implicitly through the willing assumption of the care-taking role.

Perpetrators of child abuse come from all walks of life, races, religions, and nationalities. They come from all professions and represent all levels of intelligence and standards of living. There is no single social group free from incidents of child abuse.

Abusive parents may show disregard for the child's own needs, limited abilities, and feelings. Many abusive parents believe that children exist to satisfy parental needs and that the child's needs are unimportant. Children who don't satisfy the parent's needs may become victims of child abuse.

Sexual abusers may have deviant personality traits and behaviors that can result in sexual contact with a child. Sexual abuse perpetrators sometimes use threats, bribery, coercion or force to engage a child in sexual activity. They violate the trust that a child inherently places in them for care and protection, and exploit the power and authority of their position as a trusted caretaker in order to sexually misuse a child. Often the child is threatened or warned "not to tell," creating a conspiracy of silence about the abuse.

In regard to dependent adults, ‘Caretaker’ means a related or non-related person who has the responsibility for the protection, care, or custody of a dependent adult as a result of assuming the responsibility voluntarily, by contract, through employment, or by order of the court. 

Dependent Adult

‘Dependent adult’ means a person eighteen years of age or older who is unable to protect the person’s own interests or unable to adequately perform or obtain services necessary to meet essential human needs, as a result of a physical or mental condition which requires assistance from another, or as defined by Department rule.

Rights and Responsibilities

Mandatory reporters have a right to:

Report suspected abuse without interference from their employer or supervisor (in accordance with Iowa Code section 232.70 and Iowa Code section 235B.3(3)(b)).  The employer or supervisor of a person who is a mandatory reporter cannot apply a policy, work rule, or other requirement that interferes with the person making a report of suspected child abuse.  

Mandatory reporters of child abuse are entitled to immunity from any civil or criminal liability (in accordance with Iowa Code section 232.73), which might otherwise be incurred when they participate in good faith in:

• Making a of report, photographs, or X rays,
• Performing a medically relevant test, or
• Aiding and assisting in an assessment.

Mandatory reporters of dependent adult abuse are entitled to immunity from any civil or criminal liability (in accordance with Iowa Code section 235B.3(10)) which might otherwise be incurred or imposed based upon the act of making the report or giving the assistance. The person has the same immunity with respect to participating in good faith in a judicial proceeding resulting from the report or cooperation or assistance or relating to the subject matter of the report, cooperation, or assistance.

• Oral notification by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), within 24 hours of making the report of suspected child abuse, as to whether or not the report has been accepted or rejected (in accordance with Iowa Code section 232.70).
• Written  Notice of Intake Decision  from HHS, indicating whether the report of suspected child abuse was accepted or rejected (in accordance with Iowa Code section 232.70).  
• An outcome notice from HHS (in accordance with Iowa Code section 232.70), indicating whether the report of suspected child abuse was Founded (Substantiated and Placed on the Registry), Confirmed (Substantiated but Not Placed on the Registry), or Not Confirmed (Unsubstantiated).
• An outcome notice from HHS (in accordance with Iowa Code section 235B.8(2)), of the results of the dependent adult abuse assessment and confidentiality provisions.
• Request a copy of any founded abuse assessment in which they were the mandatory reporter (in accordance with Iowa Code section 235A.15 and Iowa Code 235B.6).

Mandatory reporters have a responsibility to:

• Make an oral report of suspected abuse within 24 hours when they reasonably believe a child or dependent adult has suffered abuse (in accordance with Iowa Code section 232.69 and IAC 441—176.4)
• Note that a written report of suspected abuse is no longer required.
• Call 911 or make an oral report to law enforcement when they believe a child or dependent adult is in need of immediate protection (in accordance with Iowa Code section 232.70 and IAC 441—176.5(2)).
• Know and identify potential child abuse as defined in  Iowa Code section 232.68  and potential dependent adult abuse as defined in  Iowa Code section 235B.2(5)(a)

Mandatory Reporter Training Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Q. How do I log into the Iowa HHS Learning Management System?

A. If you are new to the Iowa HHS Learning Management System, log in by clicking on  this link  (or copy and paste the following site into your browser:  https://lsglm700.learnsoft.com/LSGLM/Login/iowalogindhs.aspx ) and register as an external user. Please write down and store your username and password in a safe but accessible place to log in and access your training records in the future.

Q: If certification was acquired prior to July 1, 2019, will I need to take the new curriculum training to maintain my certification?

A: Legislation clarifies that all valid Mandatory Reporter Training certificates issued prior to July 1, 2019 remain effective for five years. After July 1, 2019, the curriculum provided by HHS is the only training available for mandatory reporters in Iowa to maintain their certification.

Q: If I am already certified, can I just take the 1-hour recertification training? A: No. Every mandatory reporter in Iowa is required to take the full 2-hour training. 1-hour recertification training will only be available to those who have previously completed the full 2-hour training curriculum provided by HHS and whose certification has not expired.

Q. Is it the employee or employers’ responsibility to assure mandatory reporter training requirements are fulfilled?

A. It is the responsibility of the employee AND employer to assure compliance with the law.  Every mandatory reporter in Iowa is required to take the full 2-hour training AND have a non-expired certification prior to being eligible to take the 1-hour recertification training.  If a mandatory reporter allows their certificate (for either the 2-hour training or the 1-hour recertification training) to expire, they are required to take the 2-hour training again. 

It is up to the employee to maintain record of their initial 2-hour certification and provide it to their employer along with any 1-hour recertification(s) in order to be considered up to date on the statutory requirements of mandatory reporting.  It is up the employer to assure they have record of the employees initial 2-hour certification along with all 1-hour recertification(s) to document that their employees are up to date on the statutory requirements of mandatory reporting.

Q. How do I access my mandatory reporter training certificate?

A. If you took the training before July 1, 2019, HHS will not have a copy of your certificate. You will need to request a copy from the employer or agency who provided the training.   If you took the HHS training between July 1, 2019 and June 19, 2020, an actual certificate is not available. Rather, a transcript certifying your completion of the mandatory reporter training is available on the Iowa HHS Learning Management System. To access the system, click on  this link  or copy and paste the following site into your browser:  https://lsglm700.learnsoft.com/LSGLM/Login/iowalogindhs.aspx .

On the “Overview” tab, locate your dashboard. 

Click on the “Print Transcripts Report” below the number of Completed Courses.

Click on the printer icon in the top left corner to print the transcript.

If you took the HHS training after June 19, 2020, your certificate is available on the Iowa HHS Learning Management System. To access the system, click on  this link  or copy and paste the following site into your browser:  https://lsglm700.learnsoft.com/LSGLM/Login/iowalogindhs.aspx .

To access mandatory reporter certificates, email  [email protected] .

Q: What if I question the validity of a HHS certificate an employee provides as proof that mandatory reporter training was completed?

A: Contact  [email protected]  for questions regarding the validity of mandatory reporter training certificates for child abuse or dependent adult abuse.

Q: How do I know if I am a mandatory reporter?

A:  Iowa Code 232.69(1)   and  Iowa Code 235B.3(2)  define mandatory reporters in the state of Iowa. Please reference Iowa Code and speak to your employer to determine if your employment falls in the categories outlined. If you continue to have questions whether your employment qualifies you as a mandatory reporter, please seek legal advice from a legal professional. The Department of Human Services is not able to provide legal advice. 

Q: Is the Mandatory Reporter Training curriculum still reviewed and approved by the Department of Public Health?

A: No. Effective July 1, 2019, HHS is responsible for developing and providing all training for mandatory reporters in Iowa.

Q:  Is the certification I acquired prior to July 1, 2019 valid?

A:  Any certification acquired prior to July 1, 2019 from a provider approved by the Iowa Department of Public Health (IDPH) is valid for five years.  See this list  for all IDPH mandatory reporter training approval/provider numbers.

Q: What prompted the changes to how Mandatory Reporter training is offered?

A: Please see the  Mandatory Reporter Training and Certification Workgroup Report .

Q: Does Mandatory Reporter Training taken in another state meet the training requirements in Iowa?

A: No. Any mandatory reporter who practices in Iowa is required by law to take the Iowa Mandatory Reporter Training. States differ in how they define abuse and any mandatory reporter must be knowledgeable about Iowa Code to practice in Iowa.

Q: Is there a fee for each 2-hour training, or for the 1-hour recertification training?

A: There is no fee for the 2-hour training or the 1-hour recertification training - they are free for all.

Q: What is the timeframe to complete Mandatory Reporter Training?

A: Mandatory reporters for child abuse and mandatory reporters for dependent adult abuse have the same timeframe. Every individual required to report suspected abuse as defined in  Iowa Code 232.69(1)  and  Iowa Code 235B.3(2)  must complete 2 hours of mandatory reporter training within their first six months of employment or self-employment and one hour of additional training every three years (unless otherwise specified by federal regulations).  If your employment qualifies you as a mandatory reporter for both child abuse and dependent adult abuse, you are required to take  both  trainings and maintain certification for both curricula.  

Q: Will there be an opportunity for organizations to get a report on their employees from HHS on who has completed the training?

A: HHS will not be able to provide reports regarding who has completed the training. All training participants who successfully complete the training will receive a training certificate. The participant will have the ability to email, download and print their training certificate as proof of training completion. The certification of completion will be retained in the participant's training account, and it can be accessed at any time. Employers who require their staff to provide proof of training should provide clear instructions to their employees on how their organization will track training completion.

Q: Are the child and dependent adult abuse trainings still combined for one 2-hour training?

A: No. There are now separate curricula for child abuse and dependent adult abuse, each with their own certification.

Q: After I complete the initial 2-hour training, how often am I required to recertify, and how long is the recertification training?

A: Mandatory reporters must take the 1-hour recertification training within 3 years of the initial 2-hour training, and every 3 years thereafter, in order to remain in compliance with the law.

Q: Will I be reminded that my 3-year certification is preparing to expire by HHS’ LMS?

A: Not at this time. Mandatory reporters are responsible for keeping their certification current. Once participants have registered and completed Mandatory Reporter Training through HHS’ LMS, they may access their individual account at any time to review their last certification, which includes the completion date.

Q: Is support available to me if I have a technical issue?

A: Yes. Email  [email protected]   for assistance.

Q: Are Continuing Education Units offered for the mandatory reporter trainings?

A: The Iowa Board of Social work states that it is the licensees’ responsibility to determine if the continuing education programs they attend meet the requirements of their professional licensure board. Those important requirements can be located on the Iowa Department of Inspections and Appeals' (DIAL) website. The Iowa Board of Nursing has approved the mandatory reporter trainings, for both child abuse and dependent adult abuse, as fulfilling 2.0 contact hours of nursing continuing education. Questions regarding nursing CEUs may be directed to  [email protected] . For all other disciplines, please direct any questions regarding CEUs to your respective professional licensure board.

Q: Can an employer administer the training?

A: No, each participant must create their own account on HHS’ LMS and take the training individually. An employer can provide supplemental training as it relates to their professional practice  in addition  to the core training curriculum provided by HHS. 

Q. What if there are multiple mandatory reporters who need to report the same abuse?

A. When more than one mandatory reporter reasonably suspects abuse involving the same incident, each mandatory reporter is required to make a report of suspected abuse. One call can be made to make the report jointly.  Just assure that the names and contact information for all mandatory reporters making the joint report are provided to the HHS intake worker and that each of the reporters' concerns are provided during the call.

Abuse and Reporting Law Changes

Law changes that have impacted abuse and reporting by year.

State Approved Forms

Access to Confidential Abuse Information and Non-Redissemination Agreement, Form 470-3767

Authorization for Release of Child and Dependent Adult Abuse Information, Form 470-3301

Autorizacion para divulgar informacion sobre abuso de menores o adultos dependientes, Form 470-3301(S)

Record Check Evaluation, Form 470-2310

Investigacion de antecedentes penales, Form 470-2310(S)

Report of Suspected Child Abuse, Form 470-0665

Reporte de sospecha de abuso de menores, Form 470-0665(S)

Request for Child and Dependent Adult Abuse Information, Form 470-0643

Rights of Youth in Out-of-Home Placement, Form 470-5337

Suspected Dependent Adult Abuse Report, Form 470-2441

Informational Materials

Child Abuse: A Guide for Mandatory Reporters, Comm. 164

Dependent Adult Abuse: A Guide for Mandatory Reporters, Comm. 118

Abuse infantil:  Una guia para informadores obligatorios, Comm. 164(S)

Differential Response System:  Family Assessment, Comm. 450

Sistema de respuesta diferencial: Evaluación familiar, Comm. 450(S)

The State Has My Child!  What Can I Do?, Comm. 146

El estado tiene a mi hijo!  Que puedo hacer?, Comm. 146(S)

How Can I Help This Child?, Comm. 177

Como puedo ayudar a este nino?, Comm. 190

Reporting Child or Dependent Adult Abuse

• Please be ready to provide identifying information about the child or dependent adult, their parents or other caregivers, and the whereabouts of the child or dependent adult and family.
• While mandatory reporters are required to provide their name and address, all other reporters may remain anonymous.
• Mandatory reporters are required by law to make a report of suspected abuse within 24 hours of becoming aware of the concern(s).

Child or Dependent Adult Abuse Reporting

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• Crime, justice and law
• Crime prevention
• Child sexual abuse: mandatory reporting
• Home Office

Government response: mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse consultation (accessible)

Updated 9 May 2024

© Crown copyright 2024

This publication is licensed under the terms of the Open Government Licence v3.0 except where otherwise stated. To view this licence, visit nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3 or write to the Information Policy Team, The National Archives, Kew, London TW9 4DU, or email: [email protected] .

Where we have identified any third party copyright information you will need to obtain permission from the copyright holders concerned.

This publication is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/child-sexual-abuse-mandatory-reporting/outcome/government-response-mandatory-reporting-of-child-sexual-abuse-consultation-accessible

Introduction and contact details

This document is the post-consultation report for the consultation paper ‘ Mandatory Reporting of Child Sexual Abuse ’.

It will cover:

• the background to the consultation
• a summary of the consultation responses
• a detailed response to the specific questions raised in the consultation
• the next steps following this consultation.

Further copies of this report and the consultation paper can be obtained by contacting the Tackling Child Sexual Abuse Unit at the address below:

Tackling Child Sexual Abuse Unit Home Office 2 Marsham Street London SW1P 4DF

Email: [email protected]

This report is also available at: Child sexual abuse: mandatory reporting - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

Alternative format versions of this publication can be requested from [email protected]

Complaints or comments

If you have any complaints or comments about the consultation process, you should contact the Home Office at the above address.

The consultation paper ‘ Mandatory Reporting of Child Sexual Abuse ’ was published on 02 November 2023. The consultation invited comments on the Government’s proposed model for a new mandatory reporting duty, particularly:

• who the duty should apply to
• how reporters could be protected
• any exceptions which should apply
• the nature of sanctions which should apply to non-compliance with the duty.

The consultation period closed on 30 November 2023 and this report summarises the responses, including how they have influenced the final shape of the mandatory reporting duty.

The consultation was preceded and informed by a call for evidence exercise which took place between May – August 2023. Further detail on responses to the call for evidence questions which informed this consultation can be found at Annex A .

The Impact Assessment which accompanied the consultation is being updated to take account of evidence provided by stakeholders. A final version will be published as part of the Impact Assessment for the Criminal Justice Bill when the Bill receives Royal Assent.

Summary of responses

A total of 350 responses to the consultation paper were received. Of these, 321 completed the online questionnaire provided, and 29 submitted views to the dedicated consultation mailbox.

In addition to responses to the specific questions, the consultation attracted general reflections on the topic of mandatory reporting and the crime of child sexual abuse more widely.

A noticeable theme of the wider commentary was the suggestion that Government should delay introduction of the duty to allow additional time to build up preparedness.

The consultation document itself set out the Government’s willingness to provide an appropriate period to work on implementation preparedness with all impacted sectors. However, we must reiterate that any delay to accommodate specific practical challenges must be kept to a minimum.

We also acknowledge the view expressed by some stakeholders that the duty must be delivered as part of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse’s (‘the Inquiry’) holistic package of recommendations, of which mandatory reporting was one. On 10 January, the Home Secretary issued a detailed written statement on the Government’s progress in implementing the recommendations to date.

Some respondents called for the Government to go further than its outline proposals in respect of the duty. Others expressed the view that bringing forward a duty on individuals and not organisations or institutions represents a missed opportunity.

The Inquiry did not recommend an organisational duty, and consultation responses did not set out a clear evidence base for adopting one. We believe criminalising obstruction of the individual-level duty will realise the policy intent of discouraging and punishing ‘cover-ups’ of child sexual abuse, with appropriate accountability on those responsible regardless of their position in a corporate hierarchy. We will consider the potential value which organisational reporting could add as we implement and evaluate the impact of this duty.

There were often differences in perspective between respondents who identified themselves as speaking for children and those who represented victims and survivors of childhood abuse, which we have tried to navigate sensibly and with respect.

Overall, the response to the consultation on mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse fell into the following themes:

Impact on children and young people

Preparing for the duty, wider impacts, alignment with other reforms and strategy.

Some respondents raised the potential impact of a mandatory reporting duty on the provision of safe spaces for children to discuss their concerns, and any disengagement from vital safeguarding services as an unintended result. This was particularly raised when discussing confidential advice helplines and web services. Health stakeholders emphasised the need to ensure that the duty does not inhibit or delay young people from accessing healthcare services including sexual and reproductive healthcare.

We acknowledge the need to allow for exceptional cases to avoid harmful unintended consequences. The duty to report will accommodate situations where there is a strong justification on the grounds of child safeguarding or where loss of confidentiality would fatally undermine service provision – for example, a reporter will be able to delay making a report for a reasonable period where this is in the child’s best interests.

Consultation respondents also questioned the potential interaction of the mandatory reporting duty with ongoing policy measures to better understand and address harmful sexual behaviour (HSB) in young people. Some respondents set out their concerns around the impact a criminal response may have on a child who discloses the ‘perpetration’ of harmful sexual behaviour; noting that many young people in this situation will be victims of sexual abuse or other forms of harms themselves.

We will limit the definition of such disclosures to those which are made by individuals over eighteen years of age, whilst making clear in guidance that such circumstances should still receive a robust safeguarding response from reporters. As with all aspects of the duty, this will not replace or supersede reports being made in line with existing reporting processes or professional guidance.

We also received concerns that limiting the duty to direct disclosures may be disadvantageous to babies, children and young people who are non-verbal or experiencing language barriers.

We will ensure the definition of a ‘disclosure’ under the duty may be made in any form, reflecting the potential for a range of communication methods available to children and young people. This may include non-verbal forms of communication.

Several respondents raised wider equalities impacts in respect of the new duty, including communicating its meaning and consequences to children, especially those with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND); and issues around the ‘adultification’ of ethnic minority children when reporters are asked to make judgements as to the nature of consensual relationships between teenagers.

We are committed to ensuring that this duty affords all children equal protection, and will ensure this is the case as we prepare for implementation. We will include specific reference to equalities impacts when carrying out our commitment to evaluate the duty at an appropriate point.

A consistent theme among consultation responses was the need for reporters to receive adequate training and guidance. When discussing how the Government can best ensure reporters are protected in carrying out their duty, some respondents reflected that effective training can be a pre-emptive form of protection.

We received challenge to the published consultation Impact Assessment , which set out the Government’s position that a minimal amount of familiarisation would be needed given existing statutory responsibilities and guidance on reporting suspected harm to children. We are currently updating our assessment to reflect the feedback received.

Some respondents expressed the view that communicating the importance and requirements of the new duty effectively will be a key task for central government. This will include ensuring that the professionals responsible for delivery understand the duty and its relationship to existing reporting requirements and professional practice; but also that children, young people and their families are clear on how it affects their rights when accessing services and seeking support.

The Government will set out clear guidance (statutory or non-statutory) on the operation of the duty. We will work with regulators and professional standards-setting bodies to ensure the new duty is clearly communicated ahead of implementation. The suggestion to include the implications of the duty for relationships, health and sex education (RHSE) curriculum requirements will be a question for the Department for Education to consider.

However, accommodating familiarisation with the duty within recruitment, induction and working practices will be a key task for all individuals and organisations affected by the duty. Impacted sectors will consider any training and materials needed to support the workforce in delivering the duty and improving their response to child sexual abuse. The introduction of the duty should be seen as an important moment for the ‘national conversation’ on child sexual abuse envisaged by the Inquiry, and an important step leading to improvements across society in how this harm is identified and addressed.

Recruitment and retention in impacted reporting roles were brought up by a significant number of respondents. Many felt the imposition of a new reporting duty with significant personal penalties could dissuade members of the public from roles involving children and young people.

Some groups felt that in introducing a duty to report child sexual abuse, the Government may create a ‘hierarchy of abuse’ in England, with physical abuse, emotional abuse, and neglect in danger of being perceived as less important and receiving a less robust response from safeguarding professionals and organisations as an unintended consequence.

Many respondents called for the draft Impact Assessment to include the cost of supporting the ‘additional’ victims identified by reporting under the duty, with the limited capacity of specialist therapeutic support services a particular concern. Others were concerned about the potential impact on the criminal justice system, including the capacity of the courts and prison estate; and the consequent delays which victims may face in securing justice.

We acknowledge the importance of those points. The Government is taking forward separate action in these areas (recommendation 16 of the Independent Inquiry and ‘ Stable Homes, Built on Love ’). We believe that recruitment and retention issues can be appropriately managed through responsible messaging from workforce leads and commissioning bodies, particularly within sectors already subject to stringent child protection and safeguarding duties. An accurate and robust assessment of need provided by improved reporting is needed to ensure appropriate support services are commissioned.

While the hierarchy of abuse has been a longstanding consideration in adopting harm-specific measures, there is strong evidence (including from the Inquiry) that child sexual abuse is chronically underreported, and therefore requires exceptional measures.

Many respondents made the point that mandatory reporting is not a panacea to the issue of protecting children from child sexual abuse. Others set out their view that the duty must sit within an integrated cross-Government strategy to prevent harm, deal effectively with perpetrators, and support victims and survivors.

The success of a mandatory reporting duty was generally considered to be contingent on the effective delivery of all recommendations in the Inquiry’s final report and the Independent Review of the Disclosure and Barring Service. Stakeholders have also called for a clear articulation of how the mandatory reporting duty relates to the Government’s Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) Strategy, children’s workforce development plans, and ongoing multi-agency safeguarding reforms.

The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse recommended that the UK Government and Welsh Government introduce mandatory reporting regimes for this form of abuse. However, in April 2023 the Welsh Government confirmed that it would not be seeking to legislate in this area. As the duty discussed in this report will apply in England only, some respondents to the consultation took the opportunity to register their interest in understanding how it would interact with reporting and safeguarding regimes in the UK’s devolved administrations.

We will address all of these issues as we prepare for implementation of the duty ahead of commencement.

Responses to specific questions

Methodology.

It is important to note when interpreting the findings that:

The analysis presented in this report is qualitative and therefore subjective. While we are confident that others would extract similar insights, some may have different views.

• Where a chart has been provided for illustrative purposes, the underlying data is drawn from Smart Survey responses only.
• Respondents were able to skip questions they did not wish to answer. This means not all respondents provided a response to each question.

The data collected through the consultation questions was generally provided though open, free-text entries, which therefore required qualitative analysis. To enable thematic analysis, questions were divided into separate frameworks, and a coding frame (list of identified themes or topics) developed for each. Responses were then coded to this framework to extract insights, with quality assurance provided to mitigate against subjectivity.

Themes were created both inductively (i.e. developing a theme by looking at the data) and deductively (i.e. developing a theme based on topic knowledge), and edited iteratively, to ensure they remained appropriate. Analysis was developed using both Smart Survey tools and Microsoft Excel.

Common responses to open, qualitative consultation questions have been grouped in accordance with our coding framework and are presented below each question, ordered from most to least common suggestions. In view of the subjectivity involved in coding responses, exact figures have not been presented.

Consultation Questions

Q: in addition to the definition of ‘regulated activity in relation to children’ provided by the inquiry, the government is proposing to set out a list of specific roles which should be subject to the mandatory reporting duty. which roles do you consider to be essential to this list.

• education staff and volunteers
• any position working with children
• NHS/medical staff and volunteers
• social workers
• police officers
• youth organisations staff and volunteers
• leaders and volunteers within religious/faith organisations
• sports and physical activity staff and volunteers
• nursery/early years staff and volunteers
• childcare roles
• counselling and psychotherapy roles
• all adult members of the public
• arts and leisure instructors and supervisors
• staff working with children in the entertainment industry or child-centred businesses
• youth justice agencies
• transportation workers
• specialist support services staff and volunteers
• employers of under-18s
• regulators and inspectorates
• Other: including fire officers, hotel workers, courts staff, supermarkets, shops, restaurants, care homes/residential homes, civil servants, librarians, sexual offence examiners, forensic clinicians, housing officers, sports club committee members, elected officials (e.g. Members of Parliament, councillors), respite care settings, military personnel overseeing cadet forces, transport services including taxis and coaches commissioned by the providers of regulated activities, night-time economy workers, paramedics, physiotherapists, and radiographers.

We are confident that many of the roles proposed in response to this question will already be covered by the Inquiry’s definition of ‘regulated activity in relation to children’. We will provide for a regulation-making power in legislation to ensure any identified gaps can be filled, as well as to future-proof the mandatory reporting duty against the emergence of new functions or settings which it may be appropriate to consider.

Several respondents were concerned that defining specific roles could lead to unintentional loopholes in the duty; for example an organisation amending an individual’s job title while leaving their role’s essential functions unchanged in order to avoid liability. We will consider setting out a clear list of activities or functions in relation to children rather than roles. The work to develop this list will be aligned with the Government’s implementation of the Independent Review of the Disclosure and Barring Regime recommendations.

We have reflected on strong feedback that certain advice helplines, for which the assurance of confidentiality is an essential element of service provision, are not rendered inoperable by the implementation of the duty. We are considering available mechanisms to mitigate the impact of the duty in those exceptional cases where loss of confidentiality would fatally undermine the provision of safeguarding services.

Some respondents raised the importance of ensuring that introducing a duty on specific roles does not undermine longstanding messaging from Government that safeguarding children is everyone’s responsibility. We are mindful of the importance of communication in preparing for implementation and will take this feedback into account when developing messaging to contextualise the new duty.

Q: What would be the most appropriate way to ensure reporters are protected from personal detriment when making a report under the duty in good faith; or raising that a report as required under the duty has not been made?

• Anonymous reporting or confidentiality
• Protections modelled on existing whistleblowing laws
• Reporting culture written into organisational policies, procedures, codes of conduct
• Provision of roles servicing protection, confidentiality and support to reporters
• Centralised whistleblowing helpline or online portal for reports
• Immunity from civil action relating to a report
• Guidance to police/local authority on how investigations should treat reporters
• Other: including ‘without prejudice clauses’; disclaimer statements; clear procedures and guidance/definitions; greater levels of training and support; use of the NSPCC helpline; guidance setting out what will happen with a report once made; clarity that mandatory reports don’t breach confidentiality requirements; regulators auditing reporting culture; reporting should always be to an external organisation; create an offence of causing or threatening to cause detriment to a reporter.

Those that expressed a view very commonly set out their preference for anonymous or confidential reporting as an appropriate protection. However, we consider that the submission of anonymous reports poses some contradictions with the implementation of a duty on individuals. It will be in the reporter’s interest to ensure the actions they have taken in respect of the duty are clearly documented, and agencies to which reports are made will be in a better position to make an accurate assessment of risk if they understand the full context of the referral. However, we understand that in some cases a reporter may feel at risk if their role is identified (for example, to those involved in perpetrating the disclosed abuse). Through statutory guidance, we will provide clarity to relevant agencies on how a reporter’s details should be handled from the point of a report being made; including that it should be made available only to those who require it.

More broadly, we believe an effective form of ‘protection’ for reporters will be a system-wide improvement in reporting cultures in relation to child sexual abuse and normalisation of ‘speaking out’. Acknowledging that this is likely to require a long-term cultural shift, the implementation of a mandatory reporting duty will nevertheless be an important catalyst. Since the Government announced its intention to introduce mandatory reporting in April 2023, we have provided the NSPCC with £1.6m to supplement the provision of national helpline services on child sexual abuse and whistleblowing and improve public awareness of this underreported crime through a national campaign.

We heard that the formulation of protections for reporters must not interfere with the general principle of privacy owed to children and their families; or the ability of the regulatory system to scrutinise risks to public protection. We fully agree with the need to ensure frictionless implementation and will ensure that policy development in this space does not encroach on the work of any inspectorates or regulators.

A small number of respondents set out the view that personal protections for reporters are not necessary, and others stated that meaningful protections cannot really be provided by Government.

Q: In addition to the exception for consensual peer relationships, are there any other circumstances in which you believe individuals should be exempt from reporting an incident under the duty?

• No other exemptions
• Disclosure relates to historical abuse and there is no risk of further harm present
• Considerations should be made to how children with special educational needs or disabilities are included in any proposed exemptions
• There should be categories or thresholds of abuse for reporting, with some situations exempt
• In situations where there are poor provisions for reporting, individuals subject to the duty should be exempt from reporting
• Lack of mental capacity involved
• Children and young people should be able to veto a report being made about their disclosure
• Specific role exemptions (patient confidentiality, seal of the confessional)
• Disclosure is believed to be malicious reporting
• Other: including an exemption where safety of the reporter or the child/young person would be threatened by a report being made; where a report would put live investigations into jeopardy; when it is established that a report has already been made by another professional.

The overwhelming response to this consultation question indicated that no further exemptions should apply to the reporting duty.

Whilst not specifically raised by the consultation question, many respondents used this opportunity to provide additional commentary on the exemption for consensual teenage relationships designed by the Inquiry. Some expressed concern as to the practical complexity implied by the need to assess relative ages, maturity and the possibility of exploitation or coercion. Health stakeholders raised concerns that an exemption which is not wide enough to capture all consensual sexual activity between young people could deter children and teenagers from accessing sexual and reproductive healthcare services. Others warned that the exemption has the potential to create a loophole for abuse to continue, for example where a young person believes and states to reporters that an exploitative relationship is consensual (as is likely to be the case in instances of grooming). We will consider all these issues in the drafting of legislative measures and statutory guidance to support the exemption. However, it is important to give effect to the intent of the Inquiry’s exemption recommendation – which was designed to avoid undue interference with teenagers developing healthy relationships. The fact that this activity does not trigger the mandatory reporting duty does not mean it should be met by indifference or inaction by those in positions of responsibility for children. Guidance relating to the duty will make clear that sexual relationships involving teenagers under the age of consent should be referred to an appropriate agency for advice where appropriate. We will make explicit the links between this point and wider work across Government to tackle peer-on-peer sexual abuse and the development of harmful sexual behaviour.

Some responses to this question discussed the concept of ‘adultification’ (particularly in relation to black children) and how it may impact the application of an exemption based on the assessment of age or maturity. We have considered this feedback as part of our equalities impact assessment, and will continue to do so as we develop our plans for implementation.

Some health sector respondents were concerned that disclosures or confessions made to reporters while lacking mental capacity – for example, the expression of false memories or delusions during a mental health crisis – would have to be reported under the duty. We will ensure that the duty excludes cases where a suitable professional has assessed, with a reasonable foundation, that a disclosure or confession is not genuine and results from a person’s mental illness.

While not an exemption to the duty, we have reflected on feedback from some respondents on the need to accommodate the wider personal context in which a disclosure of child sexual abuse may be made. Accordingly, we will provide that a report under the duty can be delayed where this is judged by the reporter to be in best interests of the child. This will accommodate scenarios in which (for example) a child or young person is undergoing an immediate personal crisis. This will not allow for indefinite delays, and statutory guidance will make clear that any decisions to delay should be clearly documented and regularly reviewed.

The consultation received several representations setting out the view that an exemption to the mandatory reporting duty should be made in respect of sacramental confession. This is a proposal which was explicitly rejected by the Inquiry in setting out its recommendation on mandatory reporting. We are considering the implications of the duty on Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights (the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion) and will publish our assessment in respect of any final legislative measures.

Q: We are proposing that there would be criminal sanctions where deliberate actions have been taken to obstruct a report being made under the duty. What form of criminal sanction would you consider most appropriate?

Responses to this question indicated a reasonably even split between the options provided. We will reflect on this feedback as we develop legislative measures, keeping open the option of fines, imprisonment, or both applying on conviction.

Representatives of the voluntary sector raised concerns over potential liability for fines on smaller charities and other organisations with limited income. Their responses discussed the wider impact on child protection and safeguarding if such (often specialist) services were to be forced to close over the payment of fines. We are clear that liability will extend to the person engaging in such conduct, and not organisations.

Q: Should situations where a reporter has been obstructed due to active indifference or negligence also be subject to these sanctions?

While a significant amount of respondents answered ‘yes’ to this question, it was also widely acknowledged that defining or judging such behaviours would be very challenging. In addition to this being an objectively difficult assessment to make (and evidence), respondents were concerned about the potential for inconsistency of standards and approach across the various sectors the mandatory reporting duty will apply to.

We are mindful that there will likely be overlap to consider in such cases relating to the role and involvement of regulators; who may to consider active indifference or negligence in the face of child sexual abuse concerns a fitness-to-practice issue. Engagement with those responsible for regulating the different sectors involved in mandatory reporting will be factored into our implementation plans.

We recognise that reporters themselves will need clarity on what to do if their duty to report is being obstructed by negligence or active indifference. This will be covered in statutory guidance in respect of the mandatory reporting duty. We will also ensure the definition of obstructive conduct is made clear in our legislative measures and any associated guidance, reflecting the responses to this question.

Q: We would like to test the view that professional and barring measures apply to those who fail to make an appropriate report under the duty. Do you agree with this approach? Would different situations merit different levels or types of penalty?

There was overwhelming agreement with this approach from those who expressed a clear view. Where respondents provided details to support their answer, there was consensus that different scenarios could merit different penalties; with the level of ‘intentionality’ behind the failure to report often considered to be the right determinant factor.

Those disagreeing with the approach set out several reasons for their views, including that barring an individual from paid work would be disproportionate; and in a few cases disagreeing with the fundamental premise that any action should be taken against those who fail to report abuse.

A common request from respondents was for the Government to set out clear advice on process in advance for those involved in implementing the duty (for example, how to action a referral to the Disclosure and Barring Service). Several mentioned the need for Government to ensure consistency between regulators given wide range of sectors a mandatory reporting duty will apply to. We will address these points both through statutory guidance and implementation planning.

Q: Are there any costs or benefits which you think will be generated by the introduction of the proposed duty which have not been set out in the attached impact assessment?

• Financial and wider resource costs of increased reporting
• Training and awareness raising
• Recruitment and retention of staff being negatively impacted
• Emotional harm to children and young people in having to detail their abuse
• Chilling effect on the willingness of children and young people to discuss abuse
• Other costs: including supporting whistle-blowers, changing reporting systems de-prioritisation of other forms of abuse, supporting siblings and non-abusing parents
• Improved safeguarding of children and reduction in child sexual abuse
• Increased awareness and reporting of child sexual abuse
• Faster identification of, and more evidence against, perpetrators
• Other benefits: including acknowledging the courage and contribution of those who participated in the Independent Inquiry, reducing ambiguity in reporting processes

Responses to this question indicated a general sense of uncertainty over costs and benefits, with some making the point that this underscores the need to evaluate the impact of the duty in future.

There was widespread commentary that victim support services and therapeutic support will see an increase in demand. Similar points were made in respect of required placements for looked-after children. The Government is taking forward separate action in respect of these issues (recommendation 16 of the Inquiry, and Stable Homes Built on Love). We will ensure that communication and engagement with impacted workforces prior to commencement of the duty reflects their specific needs.

We acknowledge the feedback provided by many respondents that familiarisation costs assumed by the consultation impact assessment are unrealistically low. Work is being undertaken to update these figures accordingly.

Q: In light of the proposals outlined in this paper, what are the key implementation challenges and solutions reporters and organisations will face?

Challenges:

• Adjusting to the new duty with limited resources and time available
• Impact of potential over-reporting
• Reporting against a child or young person’s wishes - impact on trusted relationships
• Recruitment and retention of staff to roles subject to the duty
• Changes to pre-employment screening and employment contracts
• Additional difficulty in attracting/appointing designated safeguarding leads
• Training, toolkits
• Increasing skills and awareness
• Government policies and guidance
• Clear and effective reporting pathways and systems
• Additional funding or grants
• Protections for reporters
• Audits and monitoring of compliance with the new duty
• Sufficient time to prepare for implementation
• Improved multi-agency working between child protection agencies

Many respondents reflected on the wide, cross-sector application of the mandatory reporting duty to various roles and the different levels of awareness, competence and confidence that will exist across such a broad group. We accept and acknowledge this as an inherent feature of the proposals. Ensuring that the mandatory reporting duty is kept as simple and straightforward as possible has been a priority throughout the policy development process. Impacted sectors will consider any training and materials needed to support their workforces in delivering the duty and improving their response to child sexual abuse. As mentioned elsewhere in this report, delivering a consistency of approach to reporting, and aligning with wider child protection and safeguarding reforms, will be key points of focus as we consider implementation.

Some provided general commentary on the expected administrative burden of adjusting to the new duty (through updating policies, refreshing terms in standard contracts etc.). Other specific concerns were the need for guidance on how to manage vexatious protests against the duty; and the need to consider alignment with the legal frameworks for reporting abuse in the devolved administrations of the United Kingdom.

Other respondents used this question to register their views on the specific equalities considerations which might be applicable to children and young people with protected characteristics. We are grateful for these insights, which have been considered and reflected in the our equalities impact assessment.

Impact Assessment and Equalities

Impact assessment.

An impact assessment was prepared in respect of our consultation proposals. We are currently updating this document, including to:

• Reflect the new criminal offence of obstructing a reporter and its potential impact on prison places, HM Courts & Tribunals Service, Legal Aid and police costs.
• Update the stated familiarisation costs to take into account feedback received on length of necessary guidance issued; as well as revising workforce statistics.

A final version of the analysis will be published as part of the overarching Criminal Justice Bill impact assessment in due course.

An equalities impact assessment has been prepared in light of the consultation responses to consider likely impacts on people with protected characteristics: disability, race, sex, gender reassignment, age, religion or belief, sexual orientation, pregnancy and maternity, marriage and civil partnership. The equalities impact assessment has been published alongside this consultation response.

Where equalities impacts from our policy proposals have been identified, we have included a proportionate mitigation where necessary. The equalities impact assessment will continue to be reviewed and updated in line with our responsibilities under the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED).

More information on the PSED can be found here: Equality and diversity - Home Office - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

Conclusion and next steps

We are grateful to everyone who took the time to share their views, insights and expertise throughout the consultation process. A summary of how responses to the consultation have been reflected in our development of the policy is presented below at Annex B .

The mandatory reporting duty will, first and foremost, be a safeguarding measure. It will ensure that the words of children and young people who are seeking help are heard. It sets high standards of conduct and provides reporters with clear instructions on how to act when they are made aware of child sexual abuse. A report made under the duty is simply that – sharing information with the appropriate agencies, who can consider it further and take appropriate action to safeguard and support the child involved where necessary. We have not attached criminal penalties to the failures under the reporting duty, considering referrals to the Disclosure and Barring Service (and professional regulators where applicable) to be a more appropriate outcome. However, the reporting duty itself is accompanied by tough, punitive measures for anyone who seeks to cover up abuse. An individual who seeks to obstruct a reporter from carrying out their duty to report will face the prospect of up to seven years imprisonment. As we implement the introduction of the duty, we will continue to deliver the work outlined in the Government’s Tackling Child Sexual Abuse Strategy; ensuring professionals working with children have the skills and information they need to recognise and respond appropriately to all forms of child sexual abuse.

In presenting its final report to Government, the Inquiry reflected on the words of a participant in the Truth Project when describing their experience of disclosing child sexual abuse: “All I needed was just one person to act”.

“All I needed was just one person to act.”

Amongst those who did disclose child sexual abuse at the time, the majority said that they did not receive the help and protection that they needed. Victims and survivors often said that the person to whom they disclosed responded inadequately. Many victims and survivors were accused of lying, were blamed or were silenced. These experiences were common, whether victims and survivors disclosed as children in the 1950s or 2010s.

The Report of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (October 2022) p.137 [footnote 1]

In closing this consultation report, we are conscious that this specific measure cannot, in isolation, resolve the complex reasons for the widespread under-reporting of child sexual abuse. But by introducing a mandatory duty to report child sexual abuse, we will ensure children and young people have the confidence to know that their disclosure will be taken seriously and actioned appropriately. We will provide clarity and consistency to the activities of those responsible for the welfare of children. And in so doing, we will also ensure the continuation of a vital national conversation on this hidden crime.

• The Home Secretary informed Parliament in January that the duty will be brought forward as an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill, which is currently before the Commons.
• We will consider implementation aspects of the mandatory reporting duty, drawing on the outcomes of this consultation, to ensure an effective and consistent roll-out. Upon the Criminal Justice Bill receiving Royal Assent, we will allow a necessary time period for impacted workforces to update relevant policies and processes (and undertake a process of familiarisation) before commencing the duty.
• We will evaluate the operation of the duty after a specified period following its commencement, which will consider the impact of the duty on outcomes for children and young people, as well as system operations.
• We will maintain the engagement with stakeholders which underpinned this consultation, both to inform our implementation strategy and to assist in informing the evaluation of the operation of the duty.

Consultation principles

The principles that Government departments and other public bodies should adopt for engaging stakeholders when developing policy and legislation are set out in the Cabinet Office Consultation Principles 2018:

Consultation principles: guidance - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

Annex A: Call for evidence (May – August 2023)

Call for evidence: summary.

The consultation was preceded and informed by a call for evidence exercise which took place between May – August 2023. It attracted over one thousand responses: 993 responses to the online survey, and 68 submissions to our dedicated mailbox. It enabled the Government to consider a wide range of perspectives and ideas to develop the proposals set out in the November consultation.

The call for evidence demonstrated several areas of broad agreement with the Inquiry’s recommendation. For example, the range of reporters recommended by the Inquiry was generally considered to be appropriate, and the majority agreed with the concept of introducing a duty on relevant organisations, as well as individuals. Many noted the wider potential benefits of a new duty, for example in terms of improving awareness of child sexual abuse and giving young people greater confidence they will be listened to. Other positive impacts discussed include delivering culture change through greater accountability for organisations, reducing the likelihood of institutional ‘cover-ups’ and scapegoating of individuals. There was also agreement on the critical importance of ensuring the new duty contains appropriate protection for individuals who are making their reports in good faith.

There were also points on which opinions were mixed. Respondents were split on whether breaching the duty should be a criminal offence, with many saying different forms of punishment should be available based on the context and severity of failures. While the Inquiry recommended that the duty exclude non-harmful relationships between young people from reporting, respondents were divided on the question of there being exceptions to the duty more generally. While most agreed that young people should not be criminalised for being in a consensual relationship, there was widespread recognition that understanding and making judgements on relationships between young people could be highly challenging for those tasked with reporting. Views were also split on the question of what should be reported. Those who believed reporters should only be under a duty to report when they are directly told of sexual abuse by a child or perpetrator (or witness it themselves) often mentioned the need for clarity and consistency in order to deliver a manageable system. Respondents who believed that individuals under the duty should also make a report when they observe ‘recognised indicators’ of sexual abuse often highlighted the importance of early identification preventing more severe harm (with widespread recognition, however, that identifying the indicators of sexual abuse is a sensitive and complex task even for well-trained professionals).

Many respondents expressed concern around the potential negative impacts of implementing a new duty, from overburdening public services, lowering the quality of referrals to safeguarding agencies and reducing the amount of ‘safe spaces’ available to children and young people who may wish to discuss sexual abuse in confidence. There were also concerns raised around the potential for a new duty to be misused through false and malicious reporting. Comments on these points were generally in agreement that there would be a strong need for guidance and training relating to the new duty as well as clear, consistent processes and thresholds.

• Please see the ‘ Methodology ’ section above for a description of how the call for evidence data was analysed.

Call for Evidence Questions

Q: is the range of ‘mandated reporters’ set out by the recommendation (people working in regulated activity with children under the safeguarding and vulnerable groups act 2006, people in positions of trust as defined by the sexual offences act 2003 and police officers): (select one).

☐ Appropriate

☐ Too narrow

☐ Too broad

☐ Don’t know

Please provide details to explain your response

A large amount of respondents expressed a view that a mandatory reporting duty should apply to the general population, with some specifying that parents, foster carers and neighbours in particular should be included. This tended to be on the basis that peer abuse and familial abuse would not necessarily be captured by the duty as written. 

A significant amount of responses expressed agreement that the range of mandated reporters as set out by the Independent Inquiry is appropriate.

Others highlighted potential gaps in the definition proposed by the Inquiry (e.g., therapists), and mentioned concerns the fact that the duty will not cover vulnerable young adults in the 18-25 year old age bracket.

Some respondents mentioned the difficult position faced by industries which lack the oversight of a national governing body (e.g. dance instruction) and the wider position of unregulated activities for children.

Several respondents mentioned the need for this work to be aligned with the Independent Review of the Disclosure and Barring Service and any future changes to regulated activity definitions.

There were a small amount of responses (on both sides of the question) relating to potential impact of the duty on religious communities and structures – some were very clear in their view that seal of confession cannot be permitted to be treated as an exemption, while others flagged the potential for intervention here to be in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights (specifically the freedom of thought, conscience and religion).

Responses also provided wider general commentary on the need for awareness raising work to be undertaken in respect of impacted individuals in certain roles who may not know enough about safeguarding processes.

Q: At what level should mandatory reporting apply?

Responses to this question indicated a significant level of support for widening the scope of the Inquiry’s recommendation, either to include organisations or the general adult population.

Q: If you selected ‘Only at an organisational level (bodies, institutions or groups) / Both individual and organisational level’ in response to the question (At what level should mandatory reporting apply?). Which organisations or groups should it apply to?

Many respondents considered that all statutory partners and education settings should be accounted for under any new duty, while acknowledging that many, if not all, will already have statutory reporting duties.

Early years settings were commonly mentioned, alongside alternative provision, private schools, boarding schools, special residentials schools, and tuition settings. However, responses also reflected concern over the potential negative impact on safeguarding of overburdening professionals in this sector. 

Some considered that mandating charities and the voluntary sector to report may result in children opt out of disclosing to a trusted adult. However, applying to duty to charities and the voluntary sector was generally considered to be necessary regardless of this risk.

Faith organisations, groups and leaders, sports organisations and clubs were noted as important settings to capture, largely justified by reference to examples of historical inadequate responses.  Foster carers and staff within care homes were also flagged. Adult services were also suggested as an organisation which should be in scope, in order to facilitate the reporting of historical allegations.

Some recommended that the duty only apply to reports in relation children up to 16 years of age. Other responses however recommended extending the age to 25 years of age, particularly in respect of vulnerable young adults. 

For organisations to undertake the duty, improvements were considered to be needed in respect of existing infrastructure to support a potential uptick in reporting. Many responses agreed that organisations and individuals would need appropriate training. 

Q: If there was a mandatory reporting duty at an organisational level, should those impacted be required to report on their activity annually?

The responses to this question indicated a general agreement with the premise of a regular reporting requirement on organisations (if the duty were to apply at that level).

Q: If you selected ‘Yes’ in response to the question (If there was a mandatory reporting duty at an organisational level, should those impacted be required to report on their activity annually?) What form should that reporting take?

The most common response to this question described a regularly published annual return setting out anonymised quantitative data on reports of child sexual abuse and any subsequent actions taken.

Some responses discussed where any organisational-level reports should be sent. This generally fell into two categories – national level oversight (e.g. a central Government department) or local safeguarding partnership structures. Responses suggesting the former tended to reflect on the importance of ensuring accountability and identifying trends through data; while the latter suggestions focused more on ensuring the reports went to those with statutory powers to investigate and holding a role in improving local practice. A small number of respondents suggested reports should go to an independent central body such as the NSPCC, or a newly created child protection authority.

Other common themes were the importance of simple, standardised forms for completion, which could for example be made easily accessible through an online portal. This was generally suggested in view of the need to minimise additional bureaucracy wherever possible, and on this theme many respondents also suggested that existing reporting routes (e.g. Designated Safeguarding Leads) should be utilised wherever possible, rather than creating a new process.

Q: Should a mandatory duty to report go beyond the scope recommended by the Inquiry and cover other/all types of abuse and neglect?

The responses to this question indicated a significant amount of support for widening the scope of a mandatory reporting duty to other forms of abuse.

Q: If you selected ‘Yes’ in response to the question (Should a mandatory duty to report go beyond the scope recommended by the Inquiry and cover other/all types of abuse and neglect?). Which types of abuse and/or neglect do you think should be covered?

A large amount of responses indicated that all forms of abuse should be covered, with strong levels of support also expressed for the mandatory reporting of physical abuse. A smaller amount suggested that mandatory reporting should apply to neglect and emotional abuse.

Other types of abuse respondents suggested should be included in a mandatory reporting duty included financial abuse, modern slavery, radicalisation and domestic abuse.

Q: What impacts (positive or negative) do you think a mandatory reporting duty would have on: Children choosing to make a disclosure, either partially or in full?

Responses to this question were mixed fairly evenly between the positive and negative impacts. The majority of positive responses fell into the categories of increased confidence that action will be taken, and an improvement in children feeling listened to and protected.

Most of the responses discussing negative impacts cited the potential unintended consequence of dissuading children and young people from making a disclosure if they are aware a subsequent report must be made.

Many responses differentiated between the potential impacts on younger children and older children, mentioning that it could be more difficult for older children to make a disclosure due to fear of losing their autonomy or control of a personal situation.

Numerous responses noted that children and young people will need to be informed of the process, and a requirement for support to be made available to them after making a disclosure of sexual abuse. Several responses stated that a disclosure of this kind is often not a singular event, but rather an ongoing process throughout which a young person must be supported appropriately.

Q: What impacts (positive or negative) do you think a mandatory reporting duty would have on: Individuals within scope of the duty reporting known / suspected incidents?

There was strong agreement that training and clear guidance to support professionals will be essential to the success of the duty. A lack of sufficient clarity and the fear of getting things wrong were cited as a key reason for present under-reporting.

Common positive themes that emerged from the responses were that mandatory reporting could empower individuals to report by clarifying their responsibilities and the appropriate reporting pathways, as well as creating a more robust safeguarding environment with better-informed professionals.

Common negative themes that emerged from the responses included the fear that professionals would adopt an over-cautious or incurious approach to child sexual abuse and overreport minor suspicions for fear of punitive action if a mistake is made. Some respondents felt that the duty could create an environment where false accusations, reprisals against reporters and overstretched staff were common.

A number of respondents were concerned that the duty could result in reporters “deliberately avoiding situations where they may be disclosed to”, and others described reporting child sexual abuse and safeguarding concerns as “breaking victim’s anonymity”.

Q: What impacts (positive or negative) do you think a mandatory reporting duty would have on: Organisations within scope of the duty reporting known / suspected incidents?

The responses to this question were more likely to discuss potential negative impacts, either believing mandatory reporting would have little effect (due to reporting already taking place or a belief that it will not be executed well), or that the wider consequences of reporting would be substantial for impacted organisations.

Responses highlighted that an increased level of resource and funding would be needed to support many struggling sectors. For organisations who rely on volunteers, there were concerns that mandatory reporting responsibilities could make recruitment more difficult by deterring prospective volunteers. These organisations also highlighted the relative difficulty they anticipated in ensuring the compliance of volunteers with reporting requirements.

Concerns were raised about the impact mandatory reporting would have on confidential services and whether victims, survivors and their families would still be willing to come forward to disclose abuse when fearing negative outcomes or involvement from statutory services.

Respondents also highlighted reputational and legal consequences as a barrier to organisations enforcing mandatory reporting effectively. For example, some considered that fear of being labelled as having an ‘issue’ with child sexual abuse could deter organisations from reporting. Others were concerned that the potential legal liability could encourage staff to only report where they were highly confident that abuse had occurred. Some respondents suggested that the scope of mandatory reporting should be narrower, or that the onus should be placed centrally within an organisation rather than on the individual to ensure correct processes are being followed.

Those who responded positively felt mandatory reporting would ensure greater accountability for organisations, and would strongly disincentivise organisations from ‘covering up’ or hiding abuse. Mandatory reporting could also give clarity to organisations about their responsibilities and encourage them to improve their internal policies and processes, therefore empowering staff and making space for appropriate whistle-blowing in organisations with poor reporting cultures. Others considered that mandatory reporting would improve multi-agency working, particularly around the important issue of information sharing. It was also suggested that mandatory reporting could lead to better data collection, which could help to identify hotspots of abuse where greater resource could be placed.

Q: What impacts (positive or negative) do you think a mandatory reporting duty would have on: Individuals outside the scope of the duty reporting known / suspected incidents?

There was a strong theme of respondents recognising that the introduction of a duty could be an important lever in improving awareness of child sexual abuse, and the culture of reporting child abuse more generally.

Respondents also expressed their concern over potential unintended consequences in relation to this question. The issue most commonly raised was the risk of a new duty being taken to imply that reporting child sexual abuse was a responsibility only for the legally defined cohort of ‘mandated reporters’. Some felt this had the potential to undermine established Government messaging that child safeguarding is ‘everyone’s business’. For some this point served to underline the importance of Government undertaking awareness-raising campaigns on the issue of child sexual abuse and reporting responsibilities, as recommended elsewhere in the Independent Inquiry’s final report.

A small number of respondents expressed the view that there would be no impact on reporting by individuals outside the scope of a new duty.

Q: What impacts (positive or negative) do you think a mandatory reporting duty would have on: Organisations outside the scope of the duty reporting known / suspected incidents?

A key theme in response to this question was the implied introduction of a hierarchy in reporting responsibilities – for example, non-mandated organisations feeling devalued, or the potential to fuel a perception that reports are only to be made by a particular set of organisations. The view was again expressed that this could cut across long-standing messaging that child safeguarding is ‘everyone’s business’.

Respondents expressed concern that a mandatory reporting duty may increase the amount of disclosures being made to settings or individuals outside of the duty’s scope, as they could be seen as a ‘safe space’ to discuss sexual abuse.

The potential for the duty’s introduction to generate cultural in attitudes to reporting was generally recognised as a positive. Even if not in scope of a mandatory duty, many respondents considered that all organisations should be encouraged to report child sexual abuse. The ability to access clearly understood, non-statutory reporting guidance was considered an important tool in supporting such efforts.

It was mentioned that those organisations not subject to a mandatory reporting duty could eventually be considered less attractive to commissioning bodies such as the NHS, local authorities etc., unless voluntarily matching the requirements of a mandated organisation.

Q: What impacts (positive or negative) do you think a mandatory reporting duty would have on: Agencies in the wider safeguarding system that are required to respond to reports of abuse?

A strong theme emerged from responses to this question that a duty to report could increase workloads across already stretched workforces, and that additional funding and resourcing would therefore be needed. Many of these views recognised that the impact would be a great deal higher if mandatory reporting applied to ‘indicators’ or suspicions, rather than disclosures.

Balancing that view was a common recognition that an impact on workload is not a good enough reason to hold back from implementing a measure that would keep more children safe from child sexual abuse. Related points were also made regarding the potential for tackling child sexual abuse to offset wider societal costs of support and intervention in later life.

Respondents also reflected that a mandatory duty to report does not require mandatory action in response to a report, and that effective triage and information sharing could prevent disproportionate impacts on workload. This linked to a number of comments that compliance with a mandatory reporting duty would generate improvements to multi-agency working and information sharing. Respondents also expressed the view that a duty could serve to increase clarity of process and improve accountability for failures.

Other responses underlined the need for strong protections akin to whistleblowing policies to be in place for those making reports under the duty.

Q: What impacts (positive or negative) do you think a mandatory reporting duty would have on: Members of the public?

A number of potential negative impacts came through as consistent themes in response to this question. These included fears that individuals with important information on child sexual abuse assuming others (mandated reporters) will take the lead. Responses also discussed a reporter’s fear of reprisals from those involved in the abuse; as well as the fear of criminal consequences deterring people from seeking informal advice where they are unsure what to do. False or malicious reporting was also raised as a concern, as was the potential for high volumes of poor-quality referrals obscuring more serious concerns. Some considered that people would be less likely to volunteer or work with young people for fear of being falsely accused of sexual abuse, and a report subsequently being made under the duty.

Several positive impacts were also discussed by respondents. A common one was the improvement in public confidence and awareness that child sexual abuse is being identified and dealt with, with more members of the public knowing that children are protected and that they are safer. Respondents also considered the positive impact on reporting culture and awareness of child sexual abuse as an issue, and the strong message of zero tolerance that the introduction of a duty would send to perpetrators.

Q: At what level of knowledge should a mandatory reporting duty apply? (Select one)

☐ Restricted to known incidents of abuse

☐ Both known and suspected incidents of abuse (based on recognised indicators of abuse)

Please provide details to explain your selection

There were strong views expressed on both sides when considering whether the duty should apply to known or known and suspected incidents of abuse.

The key arguments for focusing on known abuse only included: greater clarity and consistency, reflecting the reality that assessing indicators can be complex and subjective; resulting in a more realistic and manageable duty for non-experts. Recognising indicators of abuse was mentioned by several respondents as being particularly problematic for those working in infrequent or irregular settings. Additionally, this approach was considered to tie the duty more closely to the deliberate concealment or withholding of disclosures which have been made by children and young people.

The key arguments for including suspected incidents of abuse in the duty included: greater opportunities to secure the prevention of further harm; making clear that children are not responsible for their own safeguarding; and the importance of establishing and identifying patterns in addressing abuse.

Respondents frequently mentioned the impact of communication difficulties impacting rates of disclosure, with particular considerations expressed for children with special educational needs and disabilities, and those for whom English is a secondary language.

Many respondents used this question to register their view that extensive supporting guidance will be required to specify appropriate timeframes for reporting and a list of recognised indicators relating to child sexual abuse.

Q: What should be considered a ‘disclosure’ of abuse?

Many respondents agreed that ‘disclosure’ of abuse could fall into a number of categories, including direct verbal disclosures by the child and indirect disclosure (including through writing, drawings and play). Wider indicators highlighted by respondents include changes in the child’s behaviour, physical indicators of abuse (including marks on their body or evidence, such as a photo), abuse that meets existing guidance and thresholds, and disclosure by the perpetrator.

Some respondents stated that disclosure should be a direct verbal disclosure from the child only. Others emphasised the importance of non-verbal disclosure to children who may not have the knowledge, language or ability to describe what has happened to them. Where concerns were raised, a large number of respondents stated that the Government’s definition of disclosure needs to be “unambiguous” and “fit for purpose in the context of criminal sanctions”. There was also common agreement that robust statutory guidance “must provide clear direction” to professions in scope of the duty, and that this should be supplemented by training. 

There was recognition among some respondents that disclosure can take place over a long period of time, rather than being a singular incident. Some of these respondents were anxious that a system which mandates the reporting of any initial disclosure risks harming trusted relationships with children and young people. 

Q: The Inquiry calls for ‘recognised indicators of child sexual abuse’, which are unspecified, to be set out in guidance and regularly updated – how would you rate your own personal level of confidence in spotting indicators of child sexual abuse?

Indicate on a scale between 1-10 [1: low confidence, 10: fully confident]

☐1 ☐2 ☐3 ☐4 ☐ 5 ☐6 ☐7 ☐8 ☐9 ☐10

In addition to explanations setting out the source of the respondent’s confidence level (which generally broke down evenly between ‘experience’ and ‘training’), a common theme emerged of respondents acknowledging that identifying abuse is complex even for experienced professionals, and that training should be provided for mandated reporters.

Q: How would you rate your sector’s current level of confidence in spotting indicators of child sexual abuse?

Many respondents pointed out the variability in confidence they perceive to exist across their sector given the different degrees of proximity to children and access to training. High staff turnover was mentioned by several, as well as a general theme of reliance on accessing advice from more specialist colleagues when necessary.

The importance of multi-agency working and cross-pollination of effective reporting cultures or ideas were discussed by some respondents. In some cases, perceived confidence levels were explained as being influenced by a refusal or unwillingness to acknowledge ‘it could happen here’; as well as the fear of consequences in getting it wrong or prioritising reputations over good safeguarding practice.

As a highly complex and often stigmatised form of abuse, it was generally acknowledged that it would be very difficult for anyone to credibly claim complete confidence in spotting indicators.

Q: What is your view on the Inquiry’s proposal that a breach of the mandatory reporting duty should constitute a criminal offence? (Select one)

☐ Strongly agree

☐ Neither agree nor disagree

☐ Strongly disagree

Responses to this question were mixed, although a large proportion expressed agreement. The strongest theme emerging from responses which agree was the belief that the threat of a criminal offence would be needed in order for the duty to be successful.

Where respondents disagreed, many discussed the need to avoid a blanket approach to criminalising failures to report; arguing for example that failing to report should only be a criminal offence where disclosures have actively been covered up. These responses set out the view that individual failures to report due to a lack of skills or training, or as a result of genuine mistakes should not be criminalised.  Concerns were also raised around the impact criminalisation will have on recruitment and retention in specific roles related to the safeguarding of children. 

Q: Do you believe that any other types of sanction should apply to breaches of the mandatory reporting duty (for example professional disqualification for individuals, or regulatory action in respect of organisations)? (Select one)

Most respondents agreed that other types of sanction should be in place for failing to report cases of sexual abuse. Sanctions discussed by respondents range from disqualification, suspension and mandatory training for professionals, and regulatory action, fines and inspections for organisations. Respondents were divided as to whether they thought these sanctions should be in addition to, or instead of, criminal penalties.

Many respondents agreed that breaches of the duty will need to be considered on a case-by-case basis, with sanctions based on the context, severity and motivation behind the breach. Respondents favoured more severe sanctions in cases where there is evidence of a wilful failure to report or collusion to conceal abuse. Others are concerned about sanctioning individuals (particularly those in unregistered professions) who may not have the knowledge or confidence to report abuse or have not been properly supported by their organisation to do so. Where such issues were raised, almost all respondents agreed that appropriate training will need to be provided.

Some respondents said that anxiety over being prosecuted could lead to “overzealous reporting” by professionals. Others said that having no organisational sanctions could lead to the scapegoating of individual professionals and “witch hunts”.

Q: What is your view on the exception to the duty described in the recommendation (to avoid capturing consensual peer relationships)?

The responses to this question were mixed, but indicated a general agreement with an exception designed to avoid capturing consensual relationships between young people.

Q: Is the exception (to avoid capturing consensual peer relationships) likely to cause any particular difficulties? (Select one)

Many respondents agreed that young people should not be criminalised for being in a consensual relationship. However, responses to this question also overwhelmingly recognised that defining ‘consensual’ relationships between peers will be complex and challenging for those tasked with reporting. These respondents argue that mandatory reporters may not be qualified to assess whether there is a “material difference” in the maturity and capacity of young people. Others reflected that even well-trained professionals may struggle to distinguish between consensual and coercive relationships, particularly if any of the children or young people are otherwise unknown to them. To overcome this, many respondents set out their view that clear guidance will need to be provided to ensure reporters understand the exemption and apply it appropriately.

Some respondents were concerned that the exemption could allow some inappropriate relationships to ‘fall through the cracks’ and create loopholes which could be exploited, including by gangs. It was also noted that relationships between teenagers can develop into a form of child sexual abuse through harmful sexual behaviour.

Other respondents were concerned that consensual relationships will inevitably be captured by the duty. They set out the view that the duty could lead to the inhibition of healthy sexual development, compromise relationships between young people and professionals in a position of trust, and deter young people from seeking sexual health advice.

Q: Do you think there should be any other exceptions to the duty which mean sanctions should not be applied? (Select one)

There was a mixed response to this question. While many respondents set out that no further exceptions should apply to the mandatory reporting duty, others advocated for exceptions for professionals acting in the best interest of the child or to allow consideration of the circumstances in which a disclosure was made. Another theme was the suggestion of the duty being disapplied where reporters believe a colleague or another relevant individual has already reported the disclosure.

Q: Can you foresee any overlap or tension with your or others’ existing duties or professional requirements which may be introduced by a mandatory reporting duty? (Select one)

☐ Don’t know Please provide details to explain your response

A strong theme emerged in responses to this question requesting clarity on how historical disclosures of abuse would be dealt with under the duty.

Several responses raised concerns over mandatory reporting either duplicating or superseding existing safeguarding duties. Questions were raised by others over whether the process-focused approach implied by a mandatory duty would undermine the child-focused approach of current safeguarding policies and practice.

Concerns were also raised as to how the duty might conflict with the reporter’s sense of agency. Such responses considered that certain professionals may no longer be able to rely on their own expertise and experience under the duty, and would be expected to report incidents against their professional judgement.

There was also concern around breaching duties of confidentiality to children and young people who may already be reluctant to engage with statutory services. The impact this could have on trusted relationships, and the likelihood of engagement with services in the future, were both raised by respondents as particular concerns.

Q: Do you believe the introduction of a mandatory reporting duty raises any equalities considerations? For example, positive or negative impacts on groups with protected characteristics. (Select one)

Documented cases of bias and issues of discrimination were highlighted in response to this question, particularly linked to race, ethnicity, and experience of the care system. The ‘adultification’ of black children was raised as a specific equalities consideration. Respondents also expressed concern that children with special educational needs or disabilities, may be missed as potential victims of sexual abuse given that reporters can more easily miss non-verbal cues. A general perception of distrust in statutory services within marginalised communities was also flagged by some respondents.

Some respondents considered that before a mandatory reporting duty is implemented, inequalities within social systems need to be thoroughly considered and neutralised. Others expressed the view that for a duty to work, guidance and training on biases and discrimination, and how to tackle these issues, must be provided.

Other responses drew parallels to the mandatory duty to report female genital mutilation (FGM), referring to the challenges and opportunities experienced in implementation and suggesting that learning should be taken from this experience in delivering this policy.

A small number of respondents mentioned their view that human rights (specifically Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights: freedom of thought, conscience and religion) may be impacted given the interaction of a mandatory reporting duty with sacramental confession, and the potential unwillingness of individuals to participate in religious congregations if under a duty to report abuse they hear about or witness.

Q: What, if any, kind of protections do you think would need to be in place to ensure individuals making reports in good faith do not suffer personal detriment as a result?

Many respondents to this question agreed on the critical importance of ensuring reports made in good faith do not result in any detriment to the reporter. Common views expressed as to the nature of appropriate protections were whistleblowing laws, and the availability of full or conditional anonymity for reporters. Several respondents used this question to reiterate the importance of organisations providing sufficient support to reporters under their employ or care.

Q: Should any additional reforms should be implemented to ensure that a mandatory reporting duty successfully safeguards and protects children? (Select one)

Common suggestions made in response to this question were:

• Extending the availability and quality of therapeutic support for victims/survivors, their families and reporters themselves.
• The provision of a simple to use online portal and/or standardised reporting form.
• Piloting of the new duty before full implementation, and conducting a subsequent evaluation or review of its impact.
• Providing new or revised statutory guidance for mandated reporters. This should aim to give complete clarity on questions of exemptions and handling of historical allegations.

Awareness raising campaigns for young people on recognising child sexual abuse, linked to an improved relationships, health and sex education curriculum.

• The development of new technology or systems, e.g. a national database of reports, or a national multi-agency info sharing system
• The creation of a new central body to oversee reports of child sexual abuse. 
• The introduction of a new safeguarding inspectorate.
• Revisions to the Sexual Offences Act 2003 and extending positions of trust legislation.
• A new multi-agency approach to reports which combine criminal investigation, child safeguarding response and therapeutic support.

Q: Where should reports be made to? (Select one)

☐ Local Authority

☐ Elsewhere (please specify)

While a large proportion of respondents selected ‘local authority’, responses to this question indicated support for a well joined-up system, resembling existing arrangements with a more pronounced role for the police and the incorporation of health and schools in multi-agency safeguarding hubs.

However, concerns were raised about how mandatory reporting could further stretch resources in both local authorities and the police. Some respondents considered both agencies as failing to meet the needs of children and young people, and advocated for the creation of new, independent organisations to manage reports of child sexual abuse going forwards.

Some respondents set out their views on why reports should not be made to the police. In certain cases they discussed that the police can often have complicated relationships with vulnerable groups, posing additional challenges to delivering an effective response to reports of child sexual abuse. By others, it was noted that children and young people who have engaged with services like counselling, medical or sexual health services or others may not be ready to involve the police (and may never wish to).

Clear and accessible reporting pathways, the ability to make a single report, and for all reports to be actioned by a multi-agency team (local authority, the police, schools, healthcare, etc) were popular suggestions in response to this question.

Q: The Inquiry recommended that “reports from suspicions or knowledge of abuse should be made as soon as practicable”. Should timescales from the point of suspicion/knowledge be defined more specifically? (Select one)

Those responding ‘yes’ to this question often cited the need to give clarity to reporters who may otherwise interpret the above phrasing inconsistently, and in some cases potentially delaying their report to an inappropriate degree. Many respondents drew a distinction between appropriate timescales in cases of disclosure and in cases of recognising indicators of child sexual abuse. Generally it was considered that reporting of direct disclosures should be made as soon as possible, and the recognition of signs and indicators given more flexibility.

There was a widespread view that situations should be considered on case by case basis; although others expressed the countervailing position that any delay could allow abuse to continue in intervening time period.

Between 24-48 hours of becoming aware of the abuse generally emerged as an appropriate timeframe among those who provided a specific suggestion.

Q: Would your organisation need to make any changes in order to ensure the successful implementation of a mandatory reporting duty? (Select one)

Overall responses answering ‘yes’ to this question set out similar suggestions, highlighting a need for training, changes to internal policy and processes, the need for effective oversight and supervision of reporters, sufficient reporting and recording systems to be in place (or where such systems already exist, noting where changes will be needed), and a need for further resources to make and adapt to necessary changes. Some respondents cautioned that they would not be able to specify the necessary changes until they understood the proposed reporting model in greater detail.

Alongside the necessary changes, respondents mentioned the need for sufficient lead-in time before any duty is implemented so that changes can be made in a planned and orderly way. Of the respondents who raised this point, all indicated that they would require a fairly significant amount of time.

If a mandatory reporting duty were to apply to certain organisations such as charities, support services and churches, respondents raised the prospect of making changes to their confidentiality policy which they feared could prevent victims of child sexual abuse and other harms from seeking support. On a similar note, some respondents noted that a mandatory reporting requirement may put off volunteers because of the additional responsibility involved, potentially leading to additional shortages in roles such as foster care.

Q: Would you as an individual need to make any changes in order to ensure the successful implementation of a mandatory reporting duty? (Select one)

Many respondents indicated that they will need to undertake and/or provide further training on child sexual abuse and the nature of the new mandatory reporting duty.

Others mentioned the likely need for them to amend existing practice, policies and procedures, and potentially update IT systems.

A small number of respondents flagged a potential impact on their willingness to work in a regulated sector under the threat of criminalisation; or when placed under a duty which conflicts with their personal values in supporting survivors. This included the view that a mandatory duty to report will significantly change the nature of survivor-led organisations.

Q: Are there any concerns, including the need for additional support, that you would like to flag for your sector?

Submissions provided by respondents in answer to this question included:

The current lack of inter-operable IT systems across statutory safeguarding agencies.

The need for effective multi-agency training, which may be particularly acute for non-safeguarding specialists who fall under the mandatory reporting duty.

Reporters without affiliation to national or representative bodies, and the relative lack of access to sector-specific training or advice.

Pressures on the voluntary sector in adapting to new guidance and training with limited resource or specialist support.

Additional regulatory requirements impacting on recruitment and retention of staff in impacted roles.

The difficulty experienced by some organisations in accessing and communicating with statutory safeguarding systems

The potential challenges faced by organisations operating in both England and Wales in the event that mandatory reporting duties look different across the two jurisdictions.

The reputational impact on certain specialist services (e.g. sexual violence support) and willingness of victims/survivors to access to them if no longer able to offer a non-police referral pathway.

That measures on mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse should not detract from focus and resourcing around other harms.

The need to improve compliance with existing statutory duties to notify incidents to the Disclosure and Barring Service.

Clarity on how to deal with disclosures which are made to reporters during a mental health episode.

The need for Government to review the current legal definitions of regulated activity and positions of trust.

Q: Are there any additional considerations to ensuring that your sector’s workforce or volunteers can meet any new mandatory reporting responsibilities?

Concerns were registered over the potential for additional reports to overwhelm systems, the need for effective training (with some noting the importance of this being multi-agency), and generally improving the ability and willingness of mandated reporters to recognise signs and indicators of child sexual abuse.

Some respondents reiterated the importance of providing sufficient time or notice to prepare for a new duty, and the potential for a mandatory reporting duty to impact on recruitment and retention of certain roles was similarly repeated in a number of responses to this question.

The need for more resources were frequently mentioned as being necessary to support implementation of the new duty. One respondent suggested the development of a national database or information sharing system to facilitate reporting practice.

The potential impact on the service delivery models of some specialist support services was again registered as a significant concern.

Q: Besides introducing mandatory reporting, are there any changes that could improve disclosures/ reporting / investigations and prosecution of child sexual abuse?

Respondents provided a range of suggestions as to how the disclosure, reporting, investigation and prosecution of child sexual abuse could be improved. These included reducing delays in the criminal justice system; increasing successful prosecutions of perpetrators; increasing the availability of therapeutic support services to victims, survivors and their families; providing regular, mandatory training for all professions in scope; and improving information-sharing processes between multi-agency partners.

Responses to this question were comprehensive, with a lot of criticism and concern shared, particularly in the context of the criminal justice system. Many respondents set out their view that cases of child abuse need to be investigated and progressed more quickly and criticised the low charge rate for child sexual abuse cases.

Respondents tended to doubt the potential effectiveness of the mandatory reporting duty without the provision of high-quality, specialist training for all reporters in scope. Many responses set out that there is much more work to be done in raising awareness of child sexual abuse and how to respond to it among children, professionals and the wider public.    

Annex B: Summary of policy development in view of consultation responses

Table 1: consultation issues and government response.

The Report of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (publishing.service.gov.uk)   ↩

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From August 1 Onward: Required Documents for Bringing a Dog into the United States

The documents on this website are specific to the importation of dogs under CDC’s updated dog and cat regulation, effective August 1, 2024. All suspension rules remain in effect through July 31, 2024. If your dog is entering the United States before August 1, 2024, you must follow the rules of the temporary suspension. Please find relevant information (and use the DogBot) at What Your Dog Needs to Enter the United States . On August 1, the new requirements become effective.

The documents required depend upon where your dog has been vaccinated for rabies, and what countries they have been in during the six months before traveling to the United States.

Required documents for dogs with a current rabies vaccination administered in the United States that have been in a high-risk country for dog rabies within the 6 months before entry:

• The CDC Dog Import Form will be accessible beginning July 15, 2024. Check back at that time for travel occurring on or after August 1, 2024.
• The Certification of U.S.-issued Rabies Vaccination form must be completed by a U.S.-accredited veterinarian before the dog leaves the United States. U.S.-accredited veterinarians can access the form and its instructions at Veterinary Export Health Certification System (VEHCS) Help Page
• Instructions for veterinarians are available here: Instructions to complete the Certification of U.S.-issued Rabies Vaccination Form [PDF – 4 pages] .
• This document can be shown instead of the  Certification of U.S.-issued Rabies Vaccination  form.
• The rabies vaccination must be valid (not expired) on the date of return or the form will be invalid.

Required documents for dogs that departed the United States and have been only in dog rabies-free or low-risk countries during the 6 months before entry:

AND one of the following:

• The Certification of U.S.-issued Rabies Vaccination form must be completed by a U.S.-accredited veterinarian before the dog leaves the Unites States. U.S.-accredited veterinarians can access the form and its instructions at Veterinary Export Health Certification System (VEHCS) Help Page
• Lists the destination as the dog rabies-free or low-risk country from which the dog is returning (the form will only be valid for 30 days if it does not contain rabies vaccination information) (the form will only be valid for 30 days if it does not contain rabies vaccination information), or
• Documents a valid (unexpired) rabies vaccination administered in the United States (the form will be valid for the duration of the rabies vaccination (1 or 3 years)).

Required forms for dogs that have been in a country at high-risk for dog rabies within the 6 months before entry (and do not have Certification of U.S.-Issued Rabies Vaccination form)

• Certification of Foreign Rabies Vaccination and Microchip form [PDF – 2 pages] Fillable Adobe PDF forms don’t function properly within web browsers (Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, etc). You should download fillable PDFs and complete them using Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat.
• Instructions to complete the Certification of Foreign Rabies Vaccination and Microchip form [PDF – 2 pages]
• For information on CDC-registered animal facilities, see: CDC-registered animal care facilities .

Optional, in addition to above forms, to avoid 28-day quarantine at a CDC-registered animal care facility:

• For information on CDC-approved laboratories, see: Approved Rabies Serology Laboratories for Testing Dogs .

Required documents for dogs that have been ONLY in countries that are dog rabies-free or low-risk during the 6 months before entry (and do not have Certification of U.S.-Issued Rabies Vaccination form or USDA-endorsed export health certificate)

• Certification of Dog Arriving from DMRVV-free or Low-Risk Country into the United States form
• Certification of Dog Arriving from DMRVV-free or Low-Risk Country into the United States form [PDF – 2 pages] Fillable Adobe PDF forms don’t function properly within web browsers (Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, etc). You should download fillable PDFs and complete them using Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat.
• Instructions to complete the Certification of Dog Arriving from DRMVV-free or Low-Risk Country into the United States form [PDF – 2 pages]
• Veterinary records (including microchip number) for the previous 6 months
• Certification of Foreign Rabies Vaccination and Microchip form
• Valid rabies serology titer OR veterinary records (including microchip number) for the previous 6 months
• Contact your local veterinarian in the country of export for assistance obtaining this form.
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Government moves to fund students on university placements for teaching, nursing and social work

Students experiencing "poverty placement" caused by mandatory, unpaid practical placements required for their university degrees will be eligible for a new Commonwealth payment to be unveiled in the upcoming budget.

University students studying teaching must do 16 weeks of unpaid practical experience, nurses 20 weeks and social workers 26 weeks.

Earlier this year, students told ABC News they were forced to choose between food and going to the doctor in order to meet their course requirements and graduate.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said these students would now be eligible for a new Commonwealth Prac Payment of $319.50 a week.

"Teachers give our children the best start in life, they deserve a fair start to their career," Mr Albanese said.

"We're proud to be backing the hard work and aspiration of Australians looking to better themselves by studying at university."

Yesterday, the government announced changes to student loan indexation that  wiped out $3 billion in HECS payments .

The prime minister said the measures would provide cost-of-living relief to students.

"We're funding support for placements so our future nurses, teachers and social workers can gain the experience they need," Mr Albanese said.

"We're making HECS fairer so no-one is held back by student debt. And we're expanding access to university in our regions and suburbs to make sure no Australian is left behind."

The government's move was recommended in a recent wide-ranging review of higher education called the Australian Universities Accord.

The accord panel's expert report said giving students financial support for placements was essential, to ensure they could meet their placement requirements "without falling into poverty".

"This will give people who have signed up to do some of the most important jobs in this country a bit of extra help to get the qualifications they need," Education Minister Jason Clare said.

"Placement poverty is a real thing. I have met students who told me they can afford to go to uni, but they can't afford to do the prac."

The government hasn't revealed how much the program will cost and didn't expect to have an estimate until budget night.

It has calculated 68,000 higher education students and 5,000 VET students would be eligible for the payment.

The amount of $319.50 a week is benchmarked to the single Austudy weekly rate.

It will be means tested and available from July 1, 2025.

Mr Clare said the government had listened to concerns raised by students after record HECS indexation last year and rising cost-of-living pressures.

"Some students say prac means they have to give up their part-time job, and that they don't have the money to pay the bills," Mr Clare said.

"This is practical support for practical training."

The minister for skills and training, Brendan O'Connor, said the new payment would help with a shortage of health workers.

"This prac payment is in addition to the government's investment in Fee-Free TAFE, which is supporting thousands to gain Division 2 nursing qualifications and helping to address skills shortages in aged and health care," Mr O'Connor said.

"This is an additional payment to support nursing TAFE students who have extra costs such as uniforms, travel, temporary accommodation, or childcare, during mandatory clinical placements."

As well as the university accord, the government said the new payment formed part of its response to its gender equality strategy Working for Women.

It also said the payment would help with the supply of social workers as Australia battles with a domestic violence crisis.

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Sony is making a truly terrible mistake with ‘helldivers 2’ — update: sony reverses course.

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Helldivers 2

Post updated 5/5/24. See update below.

Sony is making an egregious error of judgment when it comes to the biggest PlayStation 5 hit of the year.

Helldivers 2 has been a smash success on both PS5 and Steam, not only pulling down huge player and sales numbers, but also a ton of goodwill from players. The game is genuinely fun with an innovative live-service element and a great sense of humor. It’s no wonder that people keep coming back to kill more bugs.

Sony is poised to squander a ton of the goodwill the company has accrued, not just from Helldivers 2, but from all its efforts to port PlayStation exclusives like Horizon Zero Dawn and The Last Of Us, to PC.

The company announced recently that PC players would need to link their PlayStation Network accounts to their Steam accounts in order to continue playing the game. This, they claimed, was after an initial grace period where account linking was not required, but that grace period is coming to an end.

It feels like a bait-and-switch, luring players in on false pretenses. Yes, there’s a notice saying you need to link your accounts, but this was easy to overlook and since it wasn’t a requirement, many players either never noticed or just assumed it was an error or something Sony decided against.

Best Nintendo Switch Games: It’s Mario’s World, We’re Just Visiting

There are several problems here:

• First, this is annoying. Many PC players don’t have a PlayStation or a PSN account and it’s just plain irritating to have to go create one and then link it to your Steam account just for one game. It’s doubly annoying since this wasn’t properly communicated from day-one.
• Second, this is a little shady. Players might not have purchased the game or might have returned it if they’d known. Now Helldivers 2 is far, far outside of most players’ return window.
• Third, while Sony says this is being done for security reasons, many gamers have pointed out that the PSN hasn’t been the most secure network in the world. Opening up a new account always exposes people to new security risks.
• Finally, many regions don’t have PlayStation Network access but do have access to Steam. These players are unsure how they will continue to play the game once a PSN account is required. It also goes against Sony’s terms of use to setup a PSN account in a region that isn’t your own.

As for Sony’s reasons, security is a lousy excuse. If they were truly concerned about security, they could require some form of 2-factor authentication (or 2FA). This would not require a PlayStation account, but would be something gamers could do in any region without opening a brand new account of any kind. It would achieve security goals without being too much of a hindrance to players.

Fundamentally, though, even 2FA should be optional or should come with some cherry on top, incentivizing players to use it rather than preventing them from playing if they don’t (though I highly recommend it because your account could be hacked much more easily without 2FA).

Obviously most Helldivers 2 players will grumble about it but then sign up for PSN. But some won’t be able to, and the community as a whole will have lost a ton of faith in Sony. A lot of the goodwill that’s been gained over Helldivers 2 will be gone after this, and that’s no small thing.

Even the developer of the game, Arrowhead Games, is expressing dismay over the change, with one community manager suggesting that players change their Steam reviews to negative in protest . Clearly Sony has badly misjudged the situation and should walk back this utterly preposterous policy before they ruin a good thing. As the saying goes: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

In a surprise twist to this story, Sony has reversed course on the company’s decision to require PlayStation Network accounts for Steam players.

Since May 2nd, over 260,000 negative reviews and counting have dropped on Steam, returning All Reviews to “Mixed” and changing Recent Reviews to a shameful “Overwhelmingly Negative”. Tens of thousands of negative reviews a day have poured in from angry PC players who either don’t want to create a PlayStation Network account or who simply can’t, because they’re in one of 177 different regions where that’s simply not possible. Steam has now stopped selling the game in these regions.

Steam has also taken steps to refund anyone who wants a refund over this issue, even if you’ve played more than 2 hours and owned the game more than 2 weeks, breaking their normal return policy. At least Valve is doing right by gamers. Meanwhile, developer Arrowhead Games has urged players to make their dissatisfaction known and leave negative reviews on Steam.

All of this backlash has led to Sony’s decision to walk back the controversial change. On Sunday evening, the company tweeted:

“Helldivers fans,” the tweet reads, “we’ve heard your feedback on the Helldivers 2 account linking update. The May 6 update, which would have required Steam and PlayStation Network account linking for new players and for current players beginning May 30, will not be moving forward.

“We’re still learning what is best for PC players and your feedback has been invaluable. Thanks again for your continued support of Helldivers 2 and we’ll keep you updated on future plans.”

This is a wise move on Sony’s part. A rational response to this degree of backlash. While many Sony fanboys tried to defend the company’s decision, claiming it was all about security, clearly Sony has taken the more sensible approach. If Sony wants a share of the PC market, it will need to handle future decisions like this with more care. This is a step in the right direction. Kudos to Sony for changing course. Hopefully gamers will change their reviews to positive as a gesture of good faith, and Sony will find a better solution, or optional incentives for PC players to link their PSN accounts.

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